I will offer another idea in the same spirit: we should have a national ID system along with comprehensive administrative data about where everyone lives. This would simplify many different government and business processes, make the administrative state work better, solve questions like voter ID, and would not meaningfully impact anyone's privacy.
No, it's better to have to bring a ragged copy of your birth certificate, a dog-eared paper social security card, and some utility bills to prove who you are. That's a system that has stood the test of time - why change it?
Ha - I have a utility bill that I subscribe to for the pure reason of needing (X) number utility bill to submit for idiotic things to "prove my identity". It's literally that stupid.
A few years ago, I lived with roommates, one of whom had moved in a week earlier than the rest of us while I was abroad. That meant all of the utilities were in his name. Trying to prove my residence was such a pain.
Not only an ID but it should be associated with a bank account (at the fed or treasury) and be cryptographically enabled so you can use it to prove your identity for financial transactions etc and verify properties like your age in a zero trust fashion. These features will essentially ensure everyone has one.
Right now our digital lives are all at risk because we sometimes lose things like phones keyfobs so we need to be able to access our digital accounts if that happens. The right way to fix this is the same system for passports, the government is responsible for verifying your identity and not Gmail. That way you don't need to worry you will lose your email if you secure it and if not it can be used to steal your money. Post office branches should perform these services.
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The government bank accounts need only be mediums of exchange you can go to a private bank for interest, ATMs etc
postal banking is one of those things that i heard about in my early DSA days when anyone could kind of push an idea. It got totally dropped from their agenda but I always thought was a great concept
I don't understand. If people are worried about the government pressuring financial institutions to de bank them, why would a banking option wholly owned and operated by a government agency reassure them?
This works unless the government starts debanking people they don't like. Which would never happen, since that would require some really dangerous unhinged unserious person coming to power....
I had not actually thought of that, but yes, there is that.
And segments of the population that distrust banks for various weirdo reasons.
Anyway it's a proven model and the postal service has the existing infrastructure, so if (a large if) one were to copy a good developed world business plan it would be potentially a no marginal extra cost.
I wouldn't per se recommend any of this simply for keeping post offices open etc.
HOWEVER, having an awareness of lower income servicing international of postal banks and given an existing physical and payments infrastructure (postal money orders etc), it is an entirely sensible thing to do, if one follows some existing developed world postal bank model - there are plenty - and not do the usual American thing of reinventing the wheel autistically and over-engineered manner.
Of course as one can see here the Democrats are chock full of people Knowledge Capitalists who mistake a certain demographic / lifestyle (their familiar) with the whole economy.
(none of this would be sensible as new build or extended build but with a large footprint of assets and targetted set of demographics that are not particularly well served by broader market interest - or App centric mirages of "digital nativism"...)
Ehh..kinda...I don't see the benefit of actual cash transactions or other banking services besides ID at the post office. Leave that part online and for the fed to handle…cash will disappear shortly.
Low cost existing infra to piggyback on (in both IT sense and in extended no-extra-builds physical brancing), and provides platform for no-frills low-cost basic banking for lowest incomes and/or bank-dislikers.
Global comparatives show it's a useful complement to normal banking services, and insofar as if one does it in a manner that rides mostly on existing infra (IT and physical), if done right adds a diversifying revenue stream to postal service while having basic service (esp. rural) offer.
I wouln't personally care that much to campaign for it, but as a perfeclty proven out idea, that normally wouldn't cost taxpayers extra, it's well founded
I agree with the idea of low cost no frills basic banking. But to my mind mucking about with physical cash is exactly the kind of thing like offering notary services that will soon be a relatively niche use case that adds substantial costs -- now you need enough security to protect all that cash -- without benefiting the majority of people.
I have nothing against letting the post office charge a fee for cash transactions and offer them if that turns out to be profitable but I can't imagine how that could be true in 10 or 15 years. You could just allow people to use their ID card as a debit card from their government bank account (whether you call it postal or fed) to cover the vast majority of use cases.
Probably there are enough people scared of digital cash that offering cash services might be popular even if money losing and I'm not opposing that but I'm not endorsing it either (seems fine to me if we leave the account and moving money in/out with the fed/treasury).
For clarity in understanding: Low cost existing infra refers to... infrastructure, not services.
The Post Office already has part of such services (postal money orders etc although the urbane urbanite class are blissfully unware of such things). The infrastructure is there.
Post office platform as both physical branching network that is already existing to address low-banked / unbanked for set of basic services that under modern KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money-Laundering) that are unattractive to almost all commercial banks to offer (pain-in-the-ass factor for the banks unprofitable given their other optoins for deployment- this is Federal regulation).
The naive idea US Treasury account is just not understanding multiple levels of what is needed for retail banking and payment services, which simply US Treastury is not set0-up for and would require signficant investment.
On other hand Post Bank infrastructure and model is at once well-proven and the marginal activation requirement for such a model based on current infrastructure including existing handling systems is an additional, not a whole new approach.
Now one can take a view that fuck-it, the cash and low-doc segment of society (new immigrants, elderly, lower-income just-getting-byers, etc) can just lump it - I don't particularly have a great personal interest or committment - but as a policy solution that is a well proven one and if one takes inspiration from proven models, the existing physical and IT infrastructure in the system is a readily usable base for little marginal cost.
The other side of this is cash deposit balances in aggregate at scale is a form of capital float that would not be trivial - and economically potentially interesting (Banks despite what retail consumers think do not make principal return on their assets based on charging you fees, it's intermediation).
Because the US Treasury does not have branches everywhere. In fact it basically has none. And to have convenient Retail reach one should have a large physical branch footprint.
Postal Banks globally exist because they're very practical
the physical infrastructure is there, and in modern postal operations including their existing financial products, even the base financial plumbing is there.
Anything truly complex in financial plumbing can of course be lodged at the US Treasury.
If you are providing basic services to low-banked / not comfortable not-college educated class - i.e. not you - then you absolutely want retail reach - that's why branching of community banks exists, as well as why the retail reach of payment services, cash transfers services in low-income areas (and immigrant areas) is huge.
Retail reach piggy backing on existing infra (that is if you haven't quite understood, actual existing Post Offices that already have many payment features, where one can do Postal Money Orders and the like arleady) is absolutely rational.
It's not particularly hard, Postal Banks are really pretty standard in Rest of World.
Because people occasionally want to talk to a person at the bank while putting in or taking out cash or checks. If there were another government agency that already had a location convenient to every single person, we could use that instead. But the post office is the only one, as far as I know.
US Treasury is not set up for retail operations amigo - your solution is utterly wrong from top to bottom. Treasury is set-up in broad manner to interact with the banking backbone.
US Postal Service with its existing old fashioned payments products like the still existing postal money order etc is set-up for small retail payments and money operations, cash and non-cash.
One would be collossally stupid to give a retail mandate to US Treasury.
Of course if one wants to be autistic and ignore the whole Rest of World for some pecular ideological reason yes, inist on a non-retail agency to do retail... and then have to set-up a whole new infrastructure, IT etc.
Why you are banging on about 'propping up" post-offices escapes me.
Good luck with that. It’s crazy that people distrust their own government but are fine with powerful, unaccountable private companies having power over them.
It's SOO much worse than that. They allow the government to pass laws requiring those private companies to spy on us and -- without the usual due process protections the government has to follow -- check to see if we are trying to do something illegal and stop us.
How should we handle doctors who might be running a pill mill? Should we have the DEA, who have the records of all their controlled substance prescriptions and all their licensing info investigate that doctor using their subpeona powers if necessary? Nah, they would have too many rights let's instead tell pharmacies they are liable if they fill suspicious prescriptions even though they won't have any system for appealing decisions and will profile people to do it.
I mean the DEA does investigate doctors, but way too late, usually. The pharmacists’ “corresponding responsibility” is ridiculous though, who the fuck am I to know whether you’re truly in pain or not, I’m in no way trained to assess that. Life is pain, bruh
Thank God for electronic prescribing, though. It is so much better now than just a few years ago now that I at least know that the scripts I receive aren’t forgeries. Most even come with a diagnosis attached!
Private companies can't send men with guns to my house to imprison and/or kill me. Mostly, they target me with slightly better ads (and, in the future, price discrimination).
It is very rational to be more worried about state surveillance than private data gathering.
I've thought about that argument. But, I believe that the information the government needs to know about its people to run a national id system, the government probably already knows anyway.
There is only one issue that matters and it's limiting the influence of monocausal activists. Everything else will be fixed if we just solve that one singular issue.
I think privacy advocates would love a well-designed version which would actually increase privacy (eg age verification w/o leaving PII behind). Don't confuse them with nutters who think id cards are the number of the beast.
In fact I expect it would be groups like the FBI who would be more worried because the ability to prove you have various properties like your age would probably also allow me and Bob Last name to use it to establish that I really am taking to someone named Bob Lastname on signal. In other words it fills in the missing authentication in e2e encryption.
The thing is you need to design that in from the outset and that takes some care and often — because the people who want to stop kids from seeing porn often wish to stop adults too — overcoming political opposition.
What privacy are you losing? The government has an ID for you...like your SSN, passport and driver's license? That you are able to prove you actually posses that ID rather than just uploading an image as your bank already requires? You only gained protection against forgery.
And if we are going to have laws about what kids can access online being able to prove you are of age without saying who you are is incredibly privacy protective.
Know your customer laws mean that the government is already up in your banking buisness and the government runs the ACH system already so it's lnot changing anything about what they know.
Palintr is already working on that so I don't see how this program makes any difference. In fact, it would likely help because congress usually adds special riders (such as with social security numbers) limiting the ability to collate or connect certain data when they create programs like this. The very fact that you get a government bank account will probably increase your privacy since it will make it more salient to the voter.
IF America had a Stasi, and it kept a file on each of the 330-some million people in this country, I guarantee you that 99.9999% of those files (including yours) would say "Utterly unremarkable. Surveillance unwarranted."
Except when you aren't. And those files would also be super useful when it turned out that some previously-boring guy needed to be audited/discredited/jailed.
we're already living in a privacy dystopia! Corporations can give us slightly more targeted advertisements, and now you're saying you want the government to provide services to us more effectively??
If you want to protect youth from things like porn without violating adult speech and privacy rights you need the same thing you have in person: the ability to have the shopkeeper check your age without easily writing down your info.
The average person pays. For 80ish% of people, the only difference between the person paying and the average person paying is whether you need to engage in a financial transaction at the moment of getting your card. But for a small percent of people it actually makes a difference to whether they can enter the system.
There are likely also efficiencies of scale with managing payments through the tax system rather than requiring an extra infrastructure for tracking payments at point of service.
The federal government already runs the ACH clearinghouse and the federal reserve banking system. The cost for the banking is essentially a web portal.
You need to get government IDs already and since you can have it double as a passport you might even get some efficiencies if you can close down the state department passport offices.
The identifying information should also be changeable in case of fraud. You can prove your identity some other way, like showing up in person with your face and fingerprints, and get a new ID card with a new number. That way it's also more secure than a social security number.
In Lousianna, up through at least about 1990, at 18 you could buy alcohol in a bar to drink on the premises, but couldn't buy alcohol at a store to drink at home until 21. The official rationalle was that there would be other people around (e.g., the bartender) who would be keeping tabs on you and helping you behave responsibly (FWIW, my experience was not consistent with this). We used to figure it was OK for 18 year olds to drink, but only if they were going to drive afterwards.
Last I checked Louisiana has daiquiri drive-thrus, which are even more on the nose. Here's a 15% ABV beverage that fits in your cupholder. Make sure you don't take the tape off the lid until you get home ;p
That was possibly the weirdest actually-enforced MA law - you can't use out-of-state IDs to buy alcohol. (It changed last year.)
Technically, you could - but it wasn't considered reasonable for sellers to rely on out-of-state IDs, and the fines for selling alcohol to someone ineligible who didn't present a "reasonably reliable" ID were high, so most sellers required an in-state ID.
On one hand that's goofy, on the other hand everyone in college that had a fake ID had one from like, Idaho or something because bouncers didn't know what a real Idaho license looked like. So I kinda get it.
Absolutely agree, and very much in the spirit of the post. Although I would go further and say that all sorts of government and corporate data collection is good. It makes like easier and more pleasant for people, and as the world gets more complex, it would be better to have more of it. As an example, it's constantly annoying to make sure that all the various healthcare providers/insurers have all your info.
The actual privacy concerns with this kind of data collection should be handled by better encryption/IT and making companies liable for screwups. Banks/CCs have seemingly figured out how to let you use your money incredibly easily and yet deal with fraud/privacy, many other systems should do the same. Or even better, there's should be one (or a few) digital identity management services that handle all of these things. Either through government or privately.
On my phone I have a Digital ID, passport verified. Easy and at no cost to me. However, I doubt I will ever be asked to use it. I have tried to use my Maryland Digital License at TSA several times, but only get weird looks from the agents and hostile stares ( I assume) from the folks behind me! But maybe sometime, this will be the way to go.
One thing that always makes me enraged at our system is traveling to Europe. I went through a spell at work where I had to fly to Europe several times a year. It was so much easier going through passport control at Heathrow as an American than it was going through passport control when arriving back in the US.
US passport control has been absurdly easy for me (US citizen with Global Entry). I don't think I've even handed my passport to a human the past several times I've come back to the US by air.
Yeah it's easier if you have global entry (I don't) but that's kinda the point. Global Entry requires a lot of time to actually get approved (and some people, like me, get denied for very silly and capricious reasons....) so only really worth it if you are a frequent international traveller. Meanwhile EU countries just make it easy for everyone (or at least everyone from countries with biometric data embedded in their passports). Why do I have to go through this elaborate process and pay $100 (well, my CC company pays but I'm still paying one way or another) to get treated the same way I get treated in a foreign country in my own country!?
leaving aside the absurdly easy ways to waltz through U.S. passport control, you don't outgoing passport control in the U.S., you only have to deal with it once a trip, not twice like Schengen (and most of the rest of the world).
huh? you literally just say I'm here (and take a selfie) on the global entry app when you've landed back in the U.S. And if you don't have global entry (which would be weird for a frequent traveler), just use the mobile passport app and you still fast track the line. You clearly haven't traveled in years.
I don't have global entry. I went through the whole process of filling out their very long application, found it almost impossible to get an appointment for the interview and finally did get one because I was returning from an international trip and you can just show up at the office at the airport. But then they denied me because I had a misdemeanor on my record from 20 years ago.
But the broader point is that, yeah its much easier if you have global entry, but even getting global entry requires hours of time invested and $100 and so probably not worth it unless you are a frequent international traveller. Meanwhile I can waltz in to a European airport as a foreign national and fly through passport control without a hitch.
Mobile passport app dude. Seriously. Also European passport control ease varies dramatically airport to airport. (Source: 12-20 international trips per year.)
We already have a national ID system that's been smuggled in through the back door. Real ID is a national federated database that allows for fifty state IDs that are all constructed according to a national minimum standard, and (thanks to the miracle of technology) the 50 resulting databases can be searched/used by government agencies in a manner that mimics a single combined database.
A big technocracy blackpill for me is learning that SSNs were intentionally made insecure because there was a fear that banks, businesses, and government would use them as a quasi-national-ID otherwise, and then they did anyway despite them being literally sequential and as insecure as possible.
No that’s a horrible idea and we shouldn’t let the government be able to track people that easily. It’s upstream of lots and lots of terrible ideas and policies and is culturally unworkable to boot - no Anglosphere country has mandatory ids.
Members of Congress should be paid a lot more. Considering that Congress hasn't given itself a pay raise in nearly 20 years shows that this idea is not popular. Many of my coworkers believe that members of Congress are paid too much as it is. Do we really expect members of Congress to work solely out of their own goodwill and sense of duty?
You can add “increase the number of professional staff members” to your list. It’s not a perfect solution but it seems to me to be a necessary way to reduce the power of lobbyists & the congressional leadership.
It’s amazing to me how hard it is to convince people that increasing salaries for Congressmen, senators and staffers would actually decrease how many rich people work in Congress and how much “millionaires and billionaires” have influence over legislation
Running for office is a full-time job, even for state-level jobs.
A candidate for state house I know is spending 20+ hours a week meeting constituents. He has a job but it's on hold so not paying him. His wife keeps the household running. All this to get a job that runs about half the year and pays $14,000. The dream is to be speaker of the state house, that's a princely sum of $38,000.
I think it's an underrated reason why a lot of State legislatures end up having a disproportionate number of members with extreme view or lets be frank, absolute lunatics.
I suspect a lot of "normal" people are put off by risk/reward aspect of running for office in part due to the money issue.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike what Newt Gingrich has done to America but an underrated one was his changes to the institution of Congress itself and how much he gutted money that goes to staffers.
I'm frustrated by this talking point. Not to say that Newt didn't do it, but that Democrats have held Congress multiple times since then and could have restored that fairly easily. That they haven't suggests that its more institutional/bipartisan than "Newt did it."
In my opinion, reducing the capabilities of Congress made the system more dependent on the leadership of the chamber, and both parties' leaders like that.
It's a prisoner's dilemma in which the Republicans are walking around wearing giant signs saying "we will defect at every opportunity." No way Dems are taking the political hit of raising Congress's budget if Reps will just gut it again when they're next in power.
I don't think this is politically homeless in the same way Matt's ideas are though. It sounds like something Dems would *want* to support but think would just leave them too vulnerable to attack.
Yes, I'd be fine with both but I would choose the staffers first, and it might be more politically palatable too, since staffers don't evoke the "Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again! What a bunch of clowns" reaction as much as politicians do.
One worker in Congress for every 20,000 residents does not strike me as a particularly high ratio. To say the least. Most House members have tiny staffs relative to the amount of work they do.
We'd do a lot better to redirect all of the immense manpower that's wasted on our (I am not making this number up) 90,000 mostly pointless busybody local governments into national policymaking.
“…18,000 people working for congress. That seems excessive”
Sounds low to me.
Consider: The Architect of the Capitol alone has about 2,700 employees, and none of them are congressional staffers. Capitol Hill includes well over 18 million square feet of buildings, or nearly 3 Pentagons worth of space. That encompasses the Capitol itself (about 1.5M sq ft), office buildings (8-9M sq ft), a small subway system connecting the offices to the Capitol, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court (6M), the US Botanical Garden, a massive central plant (that until fairly recently had an enormous pile of coal on the other side of 695 with a system of conveyors to move the coal to the main boiler), and, probably most importantly, a small staff that raises and lowers US flags over the Capitol—up and down all day long—to give away to favored constituents nicely boxed with a certificate of authenticity (also sold in the employee store, or used to be).
It’s a massive undertaking. But the US is a massive country.
Why the fetish for hiring and paying bureaucrats. I have no need to have a para social relationship with my congressman. He needs a secretary and no staff beyond that. The idea that a congressional office should have policy staff is ludicrous. That’s what committee staff are for.
We appear to have 3-5x as much legislative staff per legislator as peer countries. Yikes
“Why the fetish for hiring and paying bureaucrats”
Don’t look at me. If I ran things the executive branch would be cut 95% or more, not including the functions properly belonging to the federal government. I’d move all the remaining rule making bureaucracy to Congress.
My even more unpopular opinion is all the rule-making bureaucrats in executive branch agencies should actually work directly for Congress, helping craft legislation. Republicans don't like this because it would require spending money on Congress and for Congress to, you know, occasionally do something. Democrats don't like this because their unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat friends would no longer be free to make laws.
The workaround of delegated rulemaking authority arose because forcing every policy change to go through the insanely inefficient bicameralism-and-presentment process, with its triple veto points, leads to a government that is perpetually paralyzed by partisan deadlock.
What we really need in this regard is a constitution that doesn't suck, but I'm afraid that's not really an option, so delegated rulemaking it is.
Agreed; but there's no reason it has to be delegated to the executive. Say we had regulatory bodies established by Congress, with governing boards serving staggered terms and appointed by majority vote in either the Senate or the House; regulations written by those bodies would have the force of law unless Congress overrode them or the courts ruled they had exceeded their authority.
That would require either a total reversal of extant Supreme Court precedent (I'm not sure it would even get a single vote on the current Supreme Court; the decision establishing that Congress can't do things like that, INS v. Chadha, was 7-2 back in 1984 with Bill Brennan and Thurgood Marshall in the majority) or a constitutional amendment.
I'm not opposed as a matter of institutional design-- it sounds like what they have in Westminster System countries, and I think it would be vastly preferable to what we have now-- but it's incompatible with the US constitutional structure.
This is sort of interesting because if you're familiar with the right wing arguments downstream of unitary executive theory, right wingers are arguing agencies and their staff are already creatures of Congress rather than the president.
If the compensation for being a legislator is low salary but high freedom to invest on insider info, that is the perfect recipe for getting rich people to want the job and no one else. Ban the trading and raise their pay, and then it becomes a good deal for a middle class person.
My understanding is most analysis is done on self-reported trades, which are far from comprehensive. Eg Nancy Pelosi reports all her (husband’s) trading activity, but most don’t.
Also high-level appointees at agencies like NIH, whose pay is capped at a fraction of what they would be earning as full professors at an R1 medical school, while having vastly more responsibility. It's insane.
Are you suggesting MDs who run multi-billion organizations for $225,000 are underpaid in their government sinecures? They could never hack it outside of government.
I actually think state legislatures should be part time. States are smaller and have fewer moving parts. The full-time California legislature is so bored they go out of their way to do a bunch of inane things.
Hard disagree. State legislatures need to be full-time and professionalized. You shouldn't get rich off the gig, but I would say mandating that legislators' salaries be set at whatever the median salary in that state is + a per diem for legislators who have to commute more than X miles to get to the Capitol is a good thing.
The issue is actually less pay to members per se (though that should be raised somewhat) and more pay to staff, which is awful and not competitive even with the Executive Branch much less the private sector. It's preposterous how skinflint our legislative branch is when it comes to paying for good policymaking.
But, like many of the ideas here, this is just Republicans starving government services and Dems being politically intimidated into not doing the right thing because it's easily demagogued.
Congress needs to fund itself properly across the board. Higher salaries for Congresspeople, more staffers, better paid staffers, and policy research resources all need to be properly funded for Congress to do its job effectively.
An underfunded, ineffective Congress inevitably cedes power to the executive and the courts. This is not how our Constitution is supposed to work. Congress should worry less about what the public thinks of how much they get paid, and worry more about enabling themselves to get the governance results that the people want.
You have the power of the purse, Congress. Fund yourselves.
Members of Congress get paid a fine amount—$174,000 is already well into the top 10% of salaries. Saying that getting paid that much is just working out of goodwill and duty is kind of insulting to most people. There is dignitary value in knowing that the people who rule us aren’t also making unfathomable amounts of money. They shouldn’t have it all.
You made a weird and bad faith pas de deux going from "they shouldn't be paid less than a first year associate at a Big Law firm" to "so you mean they should be paid unfathomable amounts of money?"
There's a massive amount of monetary space between those two options. Collapsing them is bad.
The big disconnect here is that, for the sort of people who typically become Congresspeople and the sort of people who typically know Congresspeople, $174,000 doesn't sound like a lot of money. For the average voter, it sounds like a ton, because the average voter is paid $62,000 (median earnings).
I suspect if you asked the average voter what CEOs should be paid, you'd get an answer in the range of $500,000-$1,000,000 a year - and they'll probably tell you that no-one should earn more than 50K in their first year of work, regardless of what they do (ie first-year associates should be on 50K or so, and they'll get to 100K in about five years).
The problem here is that voters have the ability to set Congressional pay as if the economy had the pay distribution they would like it to have, but they can't shape the whole economy to have that pay distribution, which rather leaves Congress in the cold.
Also voters wouldn't support the sort of interventions needed to make the private sector set pay the way they think it should. It isn't even a "will the ends but not the means" thing, it's just not something they've really ever thought about properly, but there are a lot of people who think that since they are paying taxes, no-one being paid out of those taxes should earn a lot more than they personally earn. It's not systematic, it's not thought-through, it's just "two hundred grand is way too much money, it's more than three times what I get paid".
Voters emphatically do not have the ability to set Congressional pay. Congress sets its own pay, and the voters' only input is to throw out a Congressman who voted to increase pay. The fact that Congress has chosen to bypass their annual cost-of-living increase since 2009 says unmistakably that Congressmen think the voters will throw them out of office if their pay increases -- and the voters will, too.
Congress ranks below used car salesmen in public esteem, and nobody's campaigning to raise the salaries of used car salesmen.
I know Congresspeople and make double that but it is still a lot of money. If someone offered me a seat in Congress I’d take the pay cut to do it in a heartbeat. In fact lots of Congresspeople spend lots of their own money to get elected. Once you’re making that much you can already afford basically all the creature comforts a normal person wants and you’re just using extra money to try to shape the world anyway, and you can shape the world more as a Congressperson than you could even as someone making a seven-figure salary.
I bet 99% of first year associates at big law firms would happily trade places with members of Congress. It’s a crappy job and that’s why they have to get paid a lot. Being a member of Congress is an extremely powerful job and it offends people’s egalitarian sensibilities for it to also be extremely well-paid.
The average House member spends 50% of their time just on raising money for the next election, never mind all the travel involved. I doubt most associates would like that. If they did they would've gone into sales.
This is why I have to think it *should* be plausible to get a constitutional amendment passed changing House terms to four years on a 50-50 staggered basis (so there are still House elections every two years, but only half the House is up for a vote), but I've never heard of anyone in power even proposing such an idea . . . .
You get to vote on the laws governing the most powerful organization to have ever existed in the known universe. Most people would love it. We rarely see Congresspeople resign unless they have to and there are lots of 70+ year olds holding on until they die. The vast majority of junior big law firm associates are trying to get out ASAP and do not work in law firms until they are 70.
I think it’s well attested that when people are given power without sufficient pay, it selects for low-skill people without better options, who are willing to leverage that power for financial gain. At best, you get people who are already well off, so they are solely motivated by acquiring power.
If we want to have legislators with skills, we have to pay for those skills, right? Paying for good work is good! It makes the hiring pool way bigger and it dilutes the influence of private money.
While we’re fantasizing though, I think this works even better with sortition, but that will have to wait for USA 4.0
Luckily places like the Revolving Door Project make it even less appealing for people with useful skills to go into congress, since they'll be sellout shills if they get a job after!
Well-attested where? If only low-skill people without better options join Congress, then getting elected should be a breeze right? I don’t think that’s the case—getting into Congress is extremely competitive and there is no shortage of people who jump into competitive races.
That would cost more. Once someone is spending c.100 nights in a single place, it's cheaper to rent or buy full-time than to pay for hotels or short-stay rentals.
What the government should do is buy a property in DC (which the Congressperson chooses, within a government-set budget), let the Congressperson live in it rent-free while they are in Congress, and then sell it when they leave. That's easily the cheapest way to do it, as the increase in value accrues to the government, not to the Congressperson. At the moment, they take on a mortgage on a property in DC, and if they stay in Congress long enough to pay that mortgage off (or even a substantial part of it), they can sell up when they leave and make a significant profit from doing so.
I know people sometimes suggest building an apartment building for Congress, but that would be much more expensive than just letting them pick one on the open market for a fair price and then having the Federal Government buy it - because concentrating all of them in one place would create a security risk that having them spread all over DC doesn't.
I bet there’s a way to do it that doesn’t require buying and selling properties every couple years - just have some office of congressional housing own a portfolio of properties, and have a process of selecting houses, the way many colleges have a draft for dorms or whatever.
We've already solved this problem with our military folks. Pay them a salary, and then pay them a separate housing allowance. If your housing allowance is $2000 a month and you find a place for $1800, great, you pocket the leftover $200. If your standards demand a $2500/mo place, fine, you pay the extra $500 out of your salary.
I would hope that raising the salary of members of congress would have at least some impact of making them less corruptible. At very least, it would increase the cost of the gifts and perks the lobbyists would have to offer to make a material difference to them.
And, even if congressional salaries were raised to something like $500,000, that's still not an unfathomable amount of money. The rich people who lobby Congress for tax breaks make over 100x that.
The idea that Congress rules us is itself laughable. If you're a Republican congressman, your entire job is to show up three days a week, have lunch with your fellow Republican congressmen, and occasionally vote "no" on something. If you're a Democratic congressman, your entire job is to complain about the Republican congressmen until you die in office at the age of 112.
I worry this would further entrench the Boeberts of the world who treat Congress as the most lucrative job they are likely to ever have. $180k is a pretty great salary, but it's also highly likely a former congressperson could make more outside of Congress. And maybe that helps with positive churn
Yeah, if you are a Republican House member, your career incentives are to get elected, stay in office long enough to get a reputation as a loudmouth nut case, then leverage that reputation to get promoted to talking head which is your only way to get a raise
The late great comic Jackie Mason had the idea to deal with the budget deficit - put Congress on commission. If the government doesn’t turn a profit, they don’t get paid!
Another politically dead idea is bringing back and investing heavily in institutions or asylums for the mentally ill. Conservatives love to talk about getting the crazies off the street. There is nowhere to put them - we can’t jail them permanently for being homeless, and not in the general population. Liberals love to talk about helping them in a way that preserves their agency and rights. Some of them are too ill for that to work.
We don't have the jail space to do it permanently either and it's preferable not putting schizophrenic in with general pop in any case.
This stuff costs money. I wonder how much cash the average schmuck would be willing to shell out to not have people sleeping in doorways and talking to spirits?
Edit: I think I'd be fine with $100/mo; but not to some homelessness charity, just to fund a system that incarcerates vagrant nutters.
It does cost a lot of money, but probably a net financial benefit, keeping someone on the streets is incredibly expensive in terms of healthcare and police time.
I wish I still trusted the type of people who do studies, because the amount of second order spending/decrease in income we've had over this issue does seem like it could start to approach the cost of just doing the asylums. On top of all the money going into the NGO borg, who is accounting for all the extra security at the library? Rebuilding the train station ten years early? Or the 50 guys who end up at the ER at the county hospital three nights week? De-needling vacant lot after vacant lot every week for ten years? Fire response?
The only thing that’s changed about the kind of people who do studies is your trust. The system has always worked by long-run debates and attempted replications, not because of the perfection of individuals or the absence of field-wide fads.
It is hard to know if it has got worse or detection got better but the replication crisis has shown that lots of people were faking or manipulating their studies.
The thing that's changed is the shutting down of long-run debates.
So no, a lack of trust is a very reasonable approach to a system that eliminated it's own correction mechanism. It'll come back, but it won't be fast, or easy.
What correction mechanism used to exist that has gone away? Did you have false beliefs about there being an extra correction mechanism that never actually existed?
Never is a long time. If you mean that it hasn't existed for longer then I appreciated, that seems true.
But asylums existed, and still exist in other countries, they are not unknowable. And some mental health interventions have been found that work to some degree.
Still, that seems to be a big argument for doing most policies based on vibes and intuition, which will usually be correct, rather than data which will basically always be bad. Especially policies like “what should be done about homelessness”
Why would vibes and intuition be more likely to be right than data? Just because one thing has a higher error rate than people assumed doesn’t mean it’s higher than the alternatives!
Most social science data, especially anything that might influence policy, is intrinsically untrustworthy due to motivated reasoning, so there’s not even really much of a point in going off anything more than vibes, especially when the “data” contradicts your lying eyes
Yeah, the core problem with institutionalization is that unless you're just warehousing people in feces-stained dungeons (which has its own... obvious... issues) it costs a metric ass-tonne of money, and it's questionable to say the least whether the outcomes are worth it.
This is such a values-driven issue that I wish the more expensive options could be opt-in somehow—like through targeted taxes or rich donors. Most people can agree there’s a moral dimension here, but how much you’re willing to spend on uncertain claims about the welfare of severely mentally ill people varies a lot from person to person.
I guess it's already kind of that way, because different states and cities fund things differently, but maybe large states or private institutions could attempt to make it more explicit.
I've seen a lot of back and forth on this debate, but I've not seen particularly convincing evidence that moving from outpatient to inpatient care as a base model is particularly useful, given similar levels of investment.
I think going from "Eh, crazy guy ranting on the street who periodically assaults old ladies, not our problem" to "This guy has to be under some kind of treatment and supervision, how shall we do it?" is the big improvement. I don't know what that ultimately looks like, except it's not leaving people to freeze to death on the streets or letting them go around craping on the ground or assaulting people until they run out of luck and end up dead.
I had understood Alexander to be against imprisoning people for mental illness. Either way, I would guess if you had enough money to create and fill prisons for the mentally ill, and instead spent it on more stringent outpatient care, you'd be more effective.
Yeah, I would be in favor of anything that works that society can afford. I don’t like the term “prison” in this framing. Being mentally ill is not a crime or offense of any kind. In an ideal world, institutions provide a safe and comfortable environment for the severely ill or schizophrenic who have no other means of support. But it seems many on the right seem to have a disgust response to the mentally ill and would not mind if they were locked up in prison-like conditions.
Love all of these. In the spirit of piece, I'll add my own: taxes on vehicle miles traveled (as well as all highways as toll roads) to replace the ineffectual gas tax. Would people hate it? Absolutely, it would never happen! It would probably force people onto surface streets in the short term (which is why you'd need to tax all miles traveled).
But tolling would (a) cause people to drive less, (b) force governments to think harder about which highways to build/expand/retire.
I dunno. In my area, the people with the longest commutes are lower- middle income people who can’t afford to live in the city. They already suffer from the longer commute and greater gas expenditure, and can’t work from home or easily cut back on their driving in other ways. I wouldn’t want to penalize them further.
That's because it's illegal to build the housing they need in the city. Everyone's commutes could be shorter if we stopped letting NIMBYs run the show.
It would be really easy with modern tech to give poor people a discount on tolls (no one else would even need to know!) just like some cities do for bus passes, but I never hear anyone talk about this.
Then they could get lower income/payroll tax burdens or better/cheaper government services. The desire to make every little policy "progressive" is what has destroyed our ability to make good granular policy.
Make the big stuff (income/payroll/sales/property tax) progressive, and make it more progressive if you can, but let's tax negative externalities like driving or alcohol or gambling, even if poor people do more of those on average.
The people who suffer most from underfunded roads and undertaxed driving are also lower income people! These are the people who bear the brunt of the negative impacts *both* of current policy and improved policy. You don’t just get to point to them to protect the status quo.
The people who suffer the most from any policy change are the poor, unless you write in specific exemptions. Poor people's behavior is easier to change than rich people's behavior (because you change behavior by introducing friction, and money can be used to reduce friction).
Roads are a really expensive line item for local and state agencies; we also should really be sunsetting roads with less heavily traveled. You can say this is unfair to more rural people and it is but they are eating up a disproportionate amount of money relative to the amount of revenue created and are loss leaders.
Honestly, my unpopular opinion in the theme of these is that we should really be using more sub-urban and urban new housing to re-home the disaffected MAGA voters dying deaths of despair.
It's foolish to try to give enough money to each small town and locality to produce more jobs for them but we can definitely get them more housing in more urban areas (eventually). This would lead to greater avg worker productivity and to closer alignment with political democracy on the margins.
I think my most unpopular opinion is "ghost towns are good; better to empty the place out when there's no longer an economic use for it than to have people hanging on with an entire economy running on subsidies from elsewhere"
I'll add usage taxes on city roads. Congestion charges are sort of there, but it shouldn't be a "daily fee to enter the city," it should be more like a "hourly fee per city block." If we get self-driving cars these are going to be essential. (Slowly driving around the block instead of parking is insane for a person, but doable for a robot.)
Oh, let me add: no free parking. That one's homeless. I hate paying for parking so I understand why no one wants to be for it.
Free parking is fine at times and places where there’s a lot of vacancy. It was insane that in downtown Bryan, TX, they charged people $1 an hour to park in the big empty parking garage they built but left the street spots that everyone wanted totally free. But I guess people thought the point of prices is to pay for the thing, not to manage demand.
Perhaps my most libertarian take is 'all roads should be privatized' because then a lot of urban planning questions resolve themselves - how much should parking cost, are parking spaces or another travel lane better, should we convert an underused highway to housing a la Rochester, NY.
They don't *have* to, but any other funding would be a cross subsidy to heavy use motorist commuters at the expense of light use and non-motorist commuters. A use fee for government services makes the best sense here.
They could make vehicle registration fees more expensive to compensate for gas tax revenue falling. That would effectively be a subsidy from low-mileage to high-mileage users, but would also be a strong incentive to low-mileage users to not have a car at all any more.
The other options are to tax car registrations, or pay for roads out of the general fund.
This doesn’t create a strong correlation between use of the road and paying for the road’s upkeep, but roads are a necessary thing and need to be paid for one way or another.
Controlled access freeways are definitely the easiest to put use fees on, for sure. A total VMT use fee would still be easy to charge by just looking at the odometer, and a weight coefficient on at least the vehicle is easy to calculate, although it can't account for cargo as easily. The congestion coefficient is more difficult, though, becuase I worry that outside freeways that would require transponders, and people would lose their shit over that.
I agree just tolling highways isn’t as optimal, but in the near term it’s more practical.
Odometer VMT opens up state-level squabbles about who gets the revenue—is it fair that CT gets to keep a Fairfield commuter’s VMT revenue when they spend a significant amount of time driving in NY?
In any event, first step would be to repeal the toll ban on federally funded highways.
Don't many cars have built-in GPS already? The data is being generated about where they are, and therefore how far they travel along a given road. You just need to give the information to the department of transportation.
No, most cars don't have built-in GPS, and most cars aren't the latest. That said, they do have portable GPS in the smartphones that people willingly carry with them.
And that's where people would freak out--"I don't want the government tracking where I'm going!!!!", even though it can be designed to just give the government the status of the road as being under one jurisdiction, or whether or not it's congested, and not precisely which road and where on the road the vehicle is.
I'd prefer a tax on vehicle weight. That would have the benefit of also encouraging lighter and more efficient vehicles, as opposed to this never ending push for larger, more dangerous for pedestrians/cyclists/etc ones.
One quirk is that the batteries make EVs heavier. I still support it because it doesn't change the fact that's already been present that heavier vehicles wear out roads more.
That's still good imo. Most EV emissions come from the size of the battery, incentivizing people to choose smaller batteries is better for the environment.
I'd actually like to abolish the gas tax now and replace it with a VMT use fee, with the weight and congestion coefficients if also possible. That gets people inured to what we should be paying for to fund roads, while also giving existing ICEV drives a short term political sop, until EVs become so good that there's no reason not to have one.
That's true. But, not by enough to matter in terms of road wear. Weight only starts to meaningfully impact road wear when you get into large commercial trucks, not passenger vehicles. The actual impact of batteries on weight in passenger vehicles is much less than this. For compact sedans, the extra weight from swapping in a battery for engine is no more than adding 4 adult passengers, and I'm yet to hear about anyone complaining about roads being torn up by vehicles used for carpools.
The gas tax is easy to levy and encourages more fuel efficient vehicles. It’s true that the tax isn’t very high, but the tax isn’t high for a reason which wouldn’t disappear if replaced.
It doesn't have to be perfect, any more than gas taxes are perfect. As a rough draft, require an annual mileage inspection. The mileage, tied to the VIN, gets reported to DMV, which assesses the tax. Have a registration category for people who think their circumstances are exceptional, where they can itemize milage.
It sounds pretty distant from perfection. I lease cars and haven't taken one in for inspection in I can't recall how long. And what if someone buys a new car and gets rid of the previous one eleven months since the last annual inspection? I guess they can "itemize mileage" in those cases, but would you believe their reported numbers?
You already renew your license every year and it's obvious the year and the make. Just say: "here's how much more you owe."
My biggest issue with your proposal is that it alters the "user pays" component of a gas tax. The more you drive, the more gas you buy; the gas taxes you pay go to maintain the roads you drive on. It's not perfect-I drive through New Jersey while refusing to use their gas stations-but for the most part, it works out. Turning it into a luxury or sin tax breaks the aspect of the tax that people can most readily accept.
If you sell your car, you report the mileage when you report the vehicle as sold. The same reading written on your title, that you and the buyer both agree is accurate. The idea is that you're required to get the inspection completed, in the same way you're required to obtain insurance, or in the same way several states require regular vehicle inspections; or, your lessor reports the mileage upon return of the vehicle. After all, they don't plan on paying that tax for you.
Itemized mileage is if you say "I live in Arlington, VA, but commute daily to Bethesda, MD." Or you say "I live in Louisville, KY, where my vehicle is registered, and regularly travel to Indianapolis, Columbus, and St. Louis." If enough states share the same system, they agree to pass funds back and forth. If not, this is something of an edge case, but leaves more than enough evidence of tax fraud if abused.
Not perfect means you make compliance worth it for the majority of people. California has the highest gas taxes in the country; a vehicle getting 15 mpg and driving 20,000 miles a year (deliberately choosing low efficiency and high usage) pays about $1,000 per year in current gas taxes.
Usage taxes are nice but they're not mandatory. The taxes that pay for schools aren't based on how many kids you have; if they're based on property taxes then that's a "luxury" tax by your criteria.
Sure, there are ways of recording and transmitting mileage. But there are lots of wholes. We've had a car in the family that my daughter uses for 15 years. There's no sale in which both sides agree on the mileage. As I noted, I don't take my leased EV in for any kind of annual inspection. There's no way of getting anything near 100% reporting of VMT unless it's self-reported, and good luck with that.
Meanwhile, annual license tag renewals are standard and easy. All we have to do is add another charge to the total.
And, btw, I think it would be a bad idea to charge some low-income Uber driver of that 15 mpg/20K miles car to pay $1000 whereas someone like me would pay far less.
Three cheers for three deeply useful perspectives. Now to the even more burning question - why are these (to this reader) genuinely correct views so homeless.
Well, look at the childish level of the gerrymandering debate that's playing out now - you started it! No, you started it! Everyone mouths the words that say gerrymandering isn't good, but yet keeps digging the hole deeper.
Maybe they'll soon get to rock bottom on this issue and start doing something constructive instead of destructive, but it's a very slow process, and there are a lot more issues like this than there is attention span to focus on them all.
I feel fairly confident that if Democrats come out of the current gerrymandering cycle with a slight advantage, they'll lose interest in any reforms that don't lock in their advantage, until population shifts erode it.
I don't think they'll trust the advantage to stick and they'd be a lot happier with a national anti-gerrymandering law. They've only been able to get the measures they have done by putting sunset clauses in; they can't rely on winning a referendum every ten years (both CA and VA have been much closer than the general D-R margin).
The California one, for instance, doesn’t abolish the neutral commission - it just overrides it until the 2030 reapportionment. After 2030, the neutral commission will do a redistricting.
As Matt has written about before, Democrats are still fighting against measures they see as suppressing voter turnout despite any such measure now being to their advantage, so I don't think the observed behavior of Democrats supports your prediction.
In both CA and VA they just recently supported the measures that they're now changing, at a time when they could have taken advantage of the numbers like they are now. This is fully consistent with their strongly held belief in norms and process.
One solution to gerrymandering I hope happens someday, is for the large red states and blue states to reach some sort of a truce through negotiations. For instance, you can start off with draft maps in Texas, Florida, California, and New York, that each gerrymander to the max. But, maybe California and Texas can work out a deal where, from those maps, the two parties do some horse trading where Democrats offer Republicans some seats in California, in exchange for Republicans offering Democrats an equal number of seats in Texas.
The makeup of congress becomes the same as in the max-gerrymander scenario, but the district boundaries become less convoluted everywhere.
While I would not call this scenario particularly likely, I do think it's the best outcome that one can realistically hope for at this point. But, in order to have leverage for meaningful negotiations, Democrats have to first establish a willingness to play hardball. Otherwise, Republicans have no incentive to offer anything.
It's not beneficial to the state Republicans so it'll never happen. What direct good does Republican seats in California do for the Republican state government in Texas?
I agree, this outcome is not likely, for the simple reason that neither party really has an incentive to trade seats with the other, when the net balance of power in Washington would be the same, anyway. But, one can dream.
I'll believe the snapping-back when I see it. And I have yet to detect any anti-gerrymandering movement on either side whose motive wasn't to deny the other side an advantage. Both sides do it, both sides call it indefensible, both sides defend it. It's political.
There was no provision for gerrymandering in the original laws. Gerrymandering and writing in a snapback was a figleaf for corruption. They'll write in a gerrymander and a snapback for the 2030 redistricting if it looks like the Democrats will benefit, depend on it.
“Depend on it”? How the law says “no”? They’ll need to pass another proposition. Do you think that’s would be guaranteed to pass without Trump as President?
The first and the third seem like a straight up tradeoff of being costly versus being insufficiently strict, with the twist being that one side each on the simplistic right/left spectrum being on inverted ends of each one.
And the guest worker one seems to be a values issue of whether we want foreign people at all in the country versus fully integrating foreign customs into the country, with economic considerations a bit on the side of that, even if it's positive sum.
The primary system funnels freaks into general election, which then funnels them into office, and working with the opposing side is seen as selling out. Case and point, AIPAC is running attack ads against Tom Malinowski for voting “with Trump and the Republicans to fund ICE”.
The content of attack ads is often unrelated to their motive. AIPAC only cares about candidates' support for Israel, but if they deem someone insufficiently pro-Israel, they will run whatever ads they think will hurt them.
I've heard similar things about the other kind of AI PAC -- they choose politicians to oppose on the basis of who wants to regulate AI, but attack them on what they think voters won't like. I vaguely recall something about the OpenAI-funded PAC attacking a candidate for being too pro-AI when their real motive for attacking the candidate was the opposite, but I don't remember the details or where I saw it (maybe somewhere in Zvi Mowshowitz's substack, but that's a big and messy place to search).
Prison reform is one of my obsessions too. Unfortunately, there’s very little NGO attention paid to it and all the money that is there, equates prison reform with ‘ending mass incarceration’. I want bad guys in prison but prison to not be hell for them.
When the punishment is too harsh, judges and juries will be more reluctant to convict people. The fear of getting caught + getting punished are the only things we know deter crime. That’s a consideration the pro-prison-should-be-torture crowd should consider.
Here's a politically homeless idea (offered by Michael Kinsley decades ago). Give felons convicted of serious crimes (short of, say, murder) a choice: X years in prison (e.g., 10) or have your dominant hand surgically removed and otherwise go free.
That may be the single worst idea on this entire thread. If you're sufficiently convinced of someone's incorrigibility that you are willing to permanently disable them by maiming, then you should just be putting them to death outright. There's no point in creating work-incapable mouths to feed.
Man, I love achieving a superlative! "Single worst idea" -- I'm loving it.
Anyway, it's a *choice.* They can always choose to go to prison for 10 years. If they choose the amputation, that probably tells you something about prison.
Or if maiming is too gross, give them the choice of being lashed severely once a month for a year but otherwise are free.
One recoils from this type of physical cruelty, as we should. But, honestly, is it worse than being incarcerated? Maybe it's nice not to be raped?
Yes, I'm repulsed by either possibility. And perhaps I would also hate being faced with the awful burden of choosing. So my strategy as a normal person is to do everything I can to never be convicted and have something as bad as either choice being forced on me.
I should note that if you polled all three of these “politically homeless” stances, I think it pretty likely you would get more self described Democrats than Republicans supporting your stances. I think you may right that some of the political opposition to all of these ideas may come Dems or lefty “groups” but I think that’s qualitatively different than saying these ideas are politically homeless. My point being I think you should be less sanguine about the idea your three propositions are politically homeless.
You want a “politically homeless” policy idea that I think is actually a very good one it’s proposing the US have a federal VAT. It’s probably the most economically efficient tax out there. And if your goal is to either raise revenue to fund new social programs or find a way to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit, this is the solution. In other words in theory it’s something either GOP or Democrats should or could be advocating. In practice, the opposition would be vociferous*. Business community would absolutely scream bloody murder at their costs going up and on the Left, a VAT would be demagogued as a giant sales tax that would fall on the poor (never mind you could exempt items like groceries). I feel like you need just one politician to take the “hit” by proposing it just so it’s finally out there in the political arena.
* There are so many tragedies involved with everything Trump is going. But one underrated one is given the absolute loyalty he has (or maybe had) from the Base, he had a unique opportunity to propose good taxes or fiscal policy most politicians would be too afraid to touch. And instead he decided on tariffs, one of the dumbest taxes you can have all because his brain turned to goo circa 1990 and his ideas about trade are stuck in era when fears of Japan literally buying America or “eating our lunch” was a very real thing.
I've been kind of thinking that even though both parties hate a VAT right now, if some day a budget crunch hits hard enough, both parties may feel they have no choice but to simultaneously flip flop to make it work, given that they might hate other taxes for for different reasons.
I'll be honest, as a lib I've always wondered why people like a VAT versus higher income/capital taxes (including on the middle class). It just feels like they'd both get the job done, and one would be more likely to actually be progressive. I know progressivism isn't the end all be all, but I want the poorest segment of Americans to pay as little tax as possible and even the lower middle class to not have to pay a ton.
The economist will say that even if you make the income tax incredibly progressive, it ends up hitting poor people, because it raises the price of all the services that rich people employees provide to businesses frequented by poor people. If you really want to raise costs least, you want an efficient tax that hits everything equally, rather than specifically disincentivizing some forms of economic activity over others. And a VAT is supposed to be the least distortionary tax possible.
You could have a progressive consumption tax: income +loan proceeds - savings and investment with a substantial individual exemption and escalating rates. This takes care of the billionaire loophole by taxing any money loaned that isn’t for investment
I am completely in favor raising capital gains taxes to where they were in the 90s. I know there is literature indicating how you don't want to overly tax investment income given investments are ultimately what grow the economy. But it seems clear to me that we are way to the left of the curve as far as the optimal capital gains tax rate should be if the goal is to maximize revenue without causing undo damage to investment. I bring up the 90s almost as evidence of my point. I think especially in "red states" there is a ton of room to increase income taxes*; the lack of income tax in Texas and Florida is just a straight up giveaway to rich people given how little middle, working class and poor people in state income taxes especially once deductions and credits are factored in. In "blue" states like CA and NY, I do suspect you might be getting somewhat close to the limits how much you can raise taxes without causing real economic harm, but no I do not believe GOP rhetoric (and especially hedge fund manager rhetoric**) that raising taxes on the 1% even a tiny amount is going to cause some avalanche of rich people to "flee" to Florida or something**.
My point being I'm not at all against the idea there is room to increase Capital gains taxes and income taxes to help fund various government programs without undo damage to the economy. I think the issue is given some of the spending proposals out there from various Democrats or left leaning orgs, it's not at all clear that there is enough money that can be generated via increasing capital gains taxes or income taxes to fund these programs unless you raised capital gains taxes and income taxes to such a degree that it would actually cause real economic harm (my guess is at or near 50% is where you start having problems). And lets be real, what we're really talking about is "Medicare for All"***. If we want some "Medicare for All", you're going to need a funding source that goes beyond modestly higher capital gains taxes and income taxes. And the appeal of VAT is its a great funding source that also comes with minimal damage (or at least less damage) to the economy than the "deadweight loss" that comes from other taxes.
** If there is something that causes my inner Lenin to come out even briefly it's when Hedge Fund Managers talk about the burden of higher taxes and then very theatrically "flee" to Florida in a way that gets headlines in WSJ and CNBC. Given Hedge Fund Managers via the carried interest loophole are some of the least taxed rich people in America, their complaints are especially nauseating and to be frank disgusting.
*** One thing I do think is damaging from Bernie is his specific "Medicare for All" proposal goes way beyond most other socialized health care systems. I don't think it's really recognized how unique UK's system given the government owns both the hospitals and provides single payer insurance. But my bigger point is there are way less costly ways to get to socialized medicine then what Bernie proposed, but unfortunately he's created an "anchor" in too many Progressives brains which means other plans that are still quite comprehensive in their scope get pilloried as some how selling out to rich special interests.
The only states I’ve lived in are Tennessee, Florida, and Washington state, so the idea of a state income tax is mind-bogglingly crazy to me.*
Like that is simply not a thing that is taken out of one’s paycheck.
*I have had a couple of paychecks out of a state where they had a state income tax and it was enough to make one viscerally angry at one’s pay stub. Especially when you consider that was in a very low services place!
I read yesterday that California spends four times as much per prisoner as Texas, without any obvious impact. There are specific issues with union in California but that seems only part of the explanation. There seems to be two general problems standards aren't enforced and spending isn't rigorously investigated for value.
Government has, over the past 20-30 years, completely lost the capacity to investigate spending for value. I don’t really know why but it’s the story over and over.
I think a lot of this is downstream of proceduralism/litigation that really started taking off in the 70s. A lot of the burden placed on government is cumulative, so it's progressively gotten worse over time.
RE: CA vs TX There are many contributing factors but one I’m aware of is that California and Texas are in different federal judiciary districts, California being much more liberal than Texas, and down stream of that California prisons are under some federal consent decrees that mandate spending on healthcare and mental health that Texas is not.
Globally, the issue IMO is that most aspects of prisons, and crime/punishment in general have very different theories of action, desired outcomes etc in lib vs leftist vs conservative groups.
Conservative: bad people commit crimes, they should be punished for their bad behavior, and society should also be protected from bad people. Prison exists to punish bad people and protect society from their badness.
Center/Lib: prison isn’t a punishment, it’s deterrence. The way prison lowers crime is through motivating people to not want to go prison. We should do an appropriately small amount of prison to deter crime and it shouldn’t be cruel.
Leftist: prison causes crime. It disrupts families and drives poverty in impacted communities. The outcomes prison drives are worse than a world with no prison, so we should have a little prison as society can stomach, ideally zero prison.
"does California's prison system optimise for their objectives"
its hard to optimize a system for any objective when the multiple stakeholders (judiciary, state executive branch, the public, the people who work at the prison) have a completely different understanding of that the system is, what is should do, and what it actually does currently in practice.
I can understand it being a total mess, the question is why is it four times more of a mess than Texas which has similar mixed incentives and unclear leadership
To be clear, I think this price differential is dumb, I'm not justifying it.
One example of cost expansion in CA, as I mentioned in my upstream reply, is that California prisons are under federal consent decrees that mandate spending on healthcare and mental health that Texas is not. The federal judiciary in california is notably more liberal/left than that in texas and they mandated this service provision.
CA labor is more expensive do to unions and higher housing costs. Construction is much cheaper in texas than CA. TX prisons use a lot of prison labor, CA doesn't.
The physical conditions in the prisons are quite different for the prisoners. CA prisons have air conditioning, texas prisons largely dont. California health care for prisoners is much better than texas health care for prisoners. California has a lot more programming for inmates paid for by the state involving NGOs that texas does not.
Prison in texas is a materially different experience than prison in CA
I think your reply is saying that even if Ca was better at investigating why their costs are higher, it might not make much difference because they have such different goals?
yes, my point is that its hard to optimize a system then the different stakeholders (judiciary, legislators/dem party, executive brand, the people who actually run the prison, the public) have completely different understandings of the purpose the system serves
I'm glad you mentioned parole along with prisons. When I got out of college, I had a temp job as a typist in the Canton, Ohio, parole office for 2 years, and it was certainly eye opening. I typed up all the reports from the parole officers, as well as reports on prospective parolees, and I regularly interacted with the officers and the existing parolees in the office. This was a long time ago (late 1990s), but there were lot of challenges that probably haven't changed much:
1. The officers were perpetually underfunded and understaffed. The Officers all had way too many people on their caseloads, and the process of ending parole early for otherwise well-behaved parolees was arduous. (This was especially true for out of state transfers, since the issuing state had to give permission - there were guys from Texas with 10-year parole lengths, which is really long).
2. It's really hard to place ex-convicts in housing and get them a job. All of the officers I worked with were really trying to help these guys stay straight (if there were problems, it was more work for the officer), but there were so many obstacles that even the parolees who were trying to get their lives back together had a really hard go of it.
3. Because of #2, most of them wound up back in their old neighborhoods, around all the influences that got them in trouble in the first place.
4. Most of the parolees I met were regular people who made bad choices, or were in really horrible circumstances. A handful seemed like genuine jerks; I don't know if they were that way before they went to prison or not.
5. A lot of the elements of complying with supervision make it harder to have a full-time job (regular reporting to the office during business hours, etc.)
6. Almost all of the parolees were men; the majority were drug offenders who had served short sentences. The others were a mix of prostitutes, sex offenders, check kiters, etc., and there were about a half dozen murderers. The murderers, because they had been institutionalized for so long, were the most agreeable people to deal with.
7. The whole system as it existed at the time I worked there was really frustrating for everyone -- the officers, the parolees, the families, etc.
This is why I buy Dave’s Killer bread: it’s a bit expensive, but it tastes good *and* the company makes a point of hiring ex-convicts to give them a way to earn a living. (The founder is an ex-convict himself IIRC.)
A significant amount of the in-person requirements are peeing in a cup while a parole officer watches you. Funny thing - if you are the only male secretary in the parole office (I was actually the only male secretary in the entire Ohio Adult Parole Authority in 1997 and 1998) everyone will assume that you are actually an officer, and that you have you a gun, and that you can watch them pee, too; thankfully, that was not part of my duties. Also interesting, the full-time, non-temp secretaries did not carry guns, but received annual firearms training.
Having lived a while in a place with access to cheap au pairs - Hong Kong - I can affirm that it is an amazing way to raise a young family. Instead of two working parents who always feel overwhelmed, you actually are able to be your own adult still. Date nights aren't this impossible thing to schedule around a high schooler's life for one.
I used to have this Puritanism about hiring other people to do things for you but having a little kid is pretty overwhelming! We never had an au pair but did hire housecleaners and night nannies. I had to promise to get over it to have our second kid and must admit it makes life way better. We should be making it easier to outsource household tasks to willing people who get paid a fair wage regardless of where they happen to have been born.
Oh it took me a while to hire someone for that reason. But I hate ironing my clothes and when I realized I was spending twice as much per week as it would cost me to hire a cleaner to come to my tiny apartment twice a week, clean it all, AND iron my clothes, I got over that mental block. (This was pre kids)
I was guessing that Matt's views on housing, education, and the global poor were going to make the list, but he's written a lot about those, and perhaps that wouldn't have fit with the additional metric of "conflict in profound ways with the agendas of both sides".
I sort of kind of guessed that taxes on greenhouse gases would make the list, evoking my usual "*shudder* Pigouvian taxes" reaction.
I would certainly accept a guest worker program as a compromise, but I don't see why such work should be time limited if the worker and the employer still like their professional relationship with each other.
The prison take I definitely wasn't expecting, and that's a good one. It always does baffle me how drugs in particular get into prisons. And the tradeoffs of cost versus incarceration are indeed tricky.
On the prisons issue, I remember Democrats making a lot of political hay out of Alabama Governor Kay Ivey spending COVID stimulus on the construction of new prisons. The idea was that Ivey was supporting mass incarceration over fighting COVID.
But many Alabama prisons are awful, some don't even have air conditioning. As this article notes, it's important to give criminals better prison conditions, so they don't recidivate and for simple human rights reasons. You'd think progressives would understand this.
Seattle had a similar dynamic with the county juvenile jail. The county executive championed a ballot measure to fund a new one in 2012 due to bad conditions in the old one, and it was approved by voters. It opened in 2020 (bad timing) and progressives HATED the fact that money was spent on juvenile detention at all. The same county executive then called for closing it, just months after it had opened. In 2024, still the same county executive (this guy was in office for a long time) changed tack again, decided the new jail was going to stay open, and declined to seek reelection. The county council went through pretty much the same twists and turns through all of this time.
Anthony Kennedy wrote a real good SCOTUS opinion detailing the problem with overcrowded prisons in particular. Probably can't push further with this SCOTUS, though, and if anything I wouldn't be surprised if states facing budget crunches start packing them in again and dare this SCOTUS to overturn what Kennedy wrote.
The worse, the better, because the more awful the prisons are, the more viable prison abolition becomes. (Yes we're only going from 0% to 0.1% in probability of success, but still worth the tradeoff in their minds.)
I mean it should be said that using COVID relief funds to build more prisons is worthy of some opprobrium no? Especially given prisons were huge vectors for spreading COVID?
Add in that the cost to build the prison ballooned from $600 million to over a billion (in a state that is famously not exactly rich. Tradeoffs and all that). Add in Alabama’s less than stellar record in properly administering justice and making sure people who don’t deserve to go to prison actually don’t end up in prison, not hard to see the case for opposition.
Feel like this is a case where the loudness of the “defund the police” brigade and some ot their more unworkable and unwise ideas is maybe distracting us from the fact that a lot prisons really do have way too many people in them setting aside how humane conditions are in said prison.
It's more that the particular case of this new prison authorized by Governor Ivey is not really a great example to use for the point Ben is trying to make. Too many confounding variables where opposition to this prison makes a lot more sense.
My suspicion is the better example for Matt's take is in California. And they kind of have gone down the route already. SB 32 passed which significantly curtailed the use of private prisons and made existing prisons more humane. In addition, there has clearly been a counter weight movement against "soft on crime" prosecutors or just general state of disorder and crime in San Francisco. Given political make up in this area, this means a whole lot of Democrats are pretty on board with more decisive prison sentences.
In other words, advice for the various candidates for governor especially the Democratic ones. Propose something along the lines of what Matt is proposing and my suspicion you'd pick up some momentum and specifically momentum from a decent number of registered Democrats.
'I would certainly accept a guest worker program as a compromise, but I don't see why such work should be time limited if the worker and the employer still like their professional relationship with each other.'
The nature of birthright citizenship means that conservatives will inevitably conclude that a guest worker program without specific end-dates is no different in terms of its effects from what they hate about other immigration pathways.
Matt: “climate change is a real problem, that it is worth bearing some cost to address, but also that it is not an apocalypse-scale problem that is worth bearing infinite costs to address.”
Matt has taught me a lot about the political economy of climate change. Here we see one crucial mistake: he delegitimizes by overstatement (“apocalypse”, “infinite”) where there is a real, awful looming disaster: the melting of Antarctic ice sheets that will submerge many of the world’s great metropolises. He is absolutely right that we cannot solve the politics of it. He is absolutely wrong to dismiss the physical reality and the economic, humanitarian, and political catastrophes that it threatens.
The question you raise, roughly, “what is the ratio of the revenue generated by a non-existent, unimplementable carbon tax over decades to the strictly unmeasurable cost of a meter* of sea level rise arriving between about 2055 and 2130?” is orthogonal to the question I raised: “what is the responsibility of us in the chattering classes given our knowledge that that sea-level rise is coming and will be catastrophic (not apocalyptic) in its effects?”
I understand Matt’s take to be “electoral democracies have no viable path to taking action to avert it in the near term”, which I agree with. I disagree with Matt’s ending the discussion there. My descendants will face something WWII-scale destruction. I think we should continue working and scheming to reduce it, as I have done for the last decade.
I think if we are going to take meaningful action, it will mostly be from better technology. So permitting reform stuff that allows the improving technogies to be deployed without a 20 year series of environmental hearings and blocking lawsuits seems really important. The way things work now, it is much easier to leave a coal-fired plant in place burning coal and pumping out CO2 and a lot of nasty stuff besides, rather than to build a non-coal plant (nuclear, say) to replace it.
One thing I think I remember reading is that when farm workers get green cards or citizenship, they go into construction, which pays better and is less arduous. Is your proposal that workers can stay as long as they'd like as long as they only work for the one employer? That seems like a ripe opportunity for employers to abuse their employees with the threat of basically deporting them if they don't do what they say. (Maybe this already exists with temporary worker programs, I'm just throwing it out there).
A theme I notice is that all these involve a right-coded solution (eg markets) to a left coded problem (climate change) or vice versa. I haven’t read all the comments, but a lot of them seem to have the same flavor. The problem and solution have opposed valence.
I understand why this makes them politically hard, but it is sad.
Hmm. This is a fascinating observation. A matrix of these would be interesting. Especially if you then added in which countries are using whatever particular combination to note where it happens in reality.
More fundamentally: Democracy isn't the end goal, it's the means we use to get to our end goal. Our end goal is human flourishing, good governance, peace and prosperity, safe streets and well-functioning public services and a well-ordered society.
Democracy isn't actually a good way to accomplish a lot of this. It's just a critical bit of feedback needed to ensure that the system doesn't run off the rails in a way that clobbers too many people at once. But many popular things are really bad to do. You can probably win an election on setting a maximum price for food below the cost of production--demonstrably you can win elections doing that for rental housing. This will be catastrophically bad, but voters are mostly not paying that much attention and are kinda dumb, so....
I truly am Slow and Boring! I agree with all these views!
Personal story: when our son was little, my husband and I hired three consecutive au pairs. It was a great experience overall. Au Pair #1 was a sweet, kind, caring, somewhat shy girl who did an awesome job, but at the end of her first year she announced that she missed her family too much and she went back to Brazil. Au Pair #2 was a good person, but we clashed because of incompatible personalities - she thought we were stodgy and no fun, we thought she was a bit thoughtless and irresponsible - but it worked out ok in the end, and our son did have fun with her. She went to work for another family after leaving us. Finally, Au Pair #3 was a superstar, our son is still in touch with her, she married an immigrant and applied to stay here long-term based on her marriage, and now she and her husband have a baby of their own.
My most politically homeless idea is that immigration law should be primarily enforced against employers and only incidentally enforced against individuals (basically, violent criminals who we're already arresting anyway). Almost all deportation should be self-deportation caused by economic incentives. Attacking the supply of illegal labor is no more effective than attacking the supply of illegal drugs.
To that end, I would sponsor a False Claims Act-style bounty-hunting program where immigrants can turn in lawbreaking employers in exchange for money and permanent residency. That will almost immediately dry up the willingness of employers to hire people without actually verifying employment eligibility. The infrastructure for this (the U visa program) is already largely in place but it needs additional legislation to make it effective. Similarly, just about any labor-law violation, when reported by an undocumented worker, should carry with it an automatic I-9 audit and a U visa for the worker.
This is politically homeless because Democrats want more immigration and don't care how they get it (and are beholden to Groups that operate as de facto advocates for illegal immigration) while Republicans want a pool of rights-less labor to exploit while simultaneously demagoguing against.
Informal self-employment is probably one of the few areas where direct enforcement is necessary, yeah. But I don't think it's inconsistent with my position because those people are effectively acting as both employer and employee.
Sounds good in theory when it sounds like you’re only targeting big corporations until you start going after family restaurants and people hiring nannies etc.
It still doesn’t fix the need for an exploited underclass to pick crops and work in slaughterhouses though, we would also need a guest worker program in such a world
I would simply not have an exploited underclass. Sufficient legal immigration will ensure an adequate labor supply, paid at legally appropriate rates. If companies take a hit, cry me a river.
It's not just companies that take a hit. Farms can't get legal citizens to pick crops for the minimum wage. The wages required would make them unviable to sell at market. Fruit and veggies especially would die on the vine. We'd either have to buy from other countries (using their exploited underclasses) or maybe innovate more with green houses and vertical farms.
Most of the ideas I care the most about are in the "experiencing houselessness" category. Probably the biggest one is my anti-income tax, pro-property tax (well ideally LVT, but I'll take what I can get) stance. Most normies just think about taxes in terms of "how much do I have to pay?" I don't blame them for thinking this. Efficiency of said taxes is nowhere in the calculation. I also think the issue of taxation gets overmoralized by the general public, as if the only reason we'd want somebody to pay taxes is because we don't like them. This is how we get lefties only wanting to tax billionaires and corporations, and MAGAs somehow funding the government out of tariff revenue or something.
I guess in a similar vein, my leftiest view that I didn't mention a few weeks ago is that conservatives need to get over poor people receiving benefits. The whole issue of "make welfare recipients fill out a million job applications, take drug tests, weigh them, and only let them eat nutriloaf," at a certain point, I don't think we're trying to save money, I think we're just signalling that we don't like these people. Which is fine, you don't have to like anybody, but most conservatives I talk to don't have the balls to say "if somebody refuses to get a job, they should starve to death," so we're back to square one. You're going to pay taxes to support these people, whether it's on welfare or in prison.
I think that may just be what annoys me the most, is people wildly and confidently over or underestimating what things cost. This was the whole DOGE thing. No Elon, the entire deficit is not attributable to foreign aid. Nor is it attributable to aid to Israel, lefties.
My politically homeless idea is that we shouldn’t do SNAP benefits, the government should distribute healthy food staples out of their own distribution center instead.
My most conservative idea is that poor people are actually highly likely to poorly deploy money, so giving them cash with no strings attached is actually an idea with significant downsides.
I also support involuntary commitment for the most extreme cases.
I don't have time to get in to extreme detail here, but most people who are poor are temporarily poor, they lost their job, their relationship ended unexpectedly and their partner was the breadwinner, stuff like that. It's smoother to just give people cash than have them fill out a million forms, then pull the rug out from under them when they finally do get a job.
This is why my idea is so perfectly homeless: Libs don't like it because it's paternalistic and insulting to the poors, conservatives don't like it because it so freely gives things away to the poors, and neolibs and centrists don't like it because it skips around the market and gets within range of government grocery stores.
No one likes your idea because it's a bad idea. Grocery is maybe the most competitive market in the United States. Who benefits from getting the government involved? Poor people wouldn't like it because instead of being able to buy groceries at the Wal-Mart you work at or the Krogers by your house, you have to take the bus 20 miles to get your government cheese. Grocery stores wouldn't like it because they still get revenue from low-dollar purchases. Taxpayers sure as hell wouldn't like paying for the creation of an entirely new set of infrastructure even though no one's having difficulty finding groceries today.
So who is this for? You, so you don't have to see poor people when you shop at Whole Foods?
I will offer another idea in the same spirit: we should have a national ID system along with comprehensive administrative data about where everyone lives. This would simplify many different government and business processes, make the administrative state work better, solve questions like voter ID, and would not meaningfully impact anyone's privacy.
No, it's better to have to bring a ragged copy of your birth certificate, a dog-eared paper social security card, and some utility bills to prove who you are. That's a system that has stood the test of time - why change it?
Ha - I have a utility bill that I subscribe to for the pure reason of needing (X) number utility bill to submit for idiotic things to "prove my identity". It's literally that stupid.
A few years ago, I lived with roommates, one of whom had moved in a week earlier than the rest of us while I was abroad. That meant all of the utilities were in his name. Trying to prove my residence was such a pain.
There's a slow boring piece on this: https://www.slowboring.com/p/trump-is-lying-about-dead-people
Not only an ID but it should be associated with a bank account (at the fed or treasury) and be cryptographically enabled so you can use it to prove your identity for financial transactions etc and verify properties like your age in a zero trust fashion. These features will essentially ensure everyone has one.
Right now our digital lives are all at risk because we sometimes lose things like phones keyfobs so we need to be able to access our digital accounts if that happens. The right way to fix this is the same system for passports, the government is responsible for verifying your identity and not Gmail. That way you don't need to worry you will lose your email if you secure it and if not it can be used to steal your money. Post office branches should perform these services.
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The government bank accounts need only be mediums of exchange you can go to a private bank for interest, ATMs etc
Postal Bank accounts is what you're reaching for. Pure payment accounts as an option.
postal banking is one of those things that i heard about in my early DSA days when anyone could kind of push an idea. It got totally dropped from their agenda but I always thought was a great concept
It is a globally proven concept
the physical infra and most of if not all of the IT infra is in place.
As a basic no-frills baseline option it's quite practical (and typically addresses the kind of business that modern banks don't actually like at all)
I think it would have a lot of traction with the people worried about debanking, which crosses parties.
I don't understand. If people are worried about the government pressuring financial institutions to de bank them, why would a banking option wholly owned and operated by a government agency reassure them?
This works unless the government starts debanking people they don't like. Which would never happen, since that would require some really dangerous unhinged unserious person coming to power....
I had not actually thought of that, but yes, there is that.
And segments of the population that distrust banks for various weirdo reasons.
Anyway it's a proven model and the postal service has the existing infrastructure, so if (a large if) one were to copy a good developed world business plan it would be potentially a no marginal extra cost.
Matt Yglesias was suggested this a while ago. A way to keep rural post offices open plus provide banking services.
I wouldn't per se recommend any of this simply for keeping post offices open etc.
HOWEVER, having an awareness of lower income servicing international of postal banks and given an existing physical and payments infrastructure (postal money orders etc), it is an entirely sensible thing to do, if one follows some existing developed world postal bank model - there are plenty - and not do the usual American thing of reinventing the wheel autistically and over-engineered manner.
Of course as one can see here the Democrats are chock full of people Knowledge Capitalists who mistake a certain demographic / lifestyle (their familiar) with the whole economy.
(none of this would be sensible as new build or extended build but with a large footprint of assets and targetted set of demographics that are not particularly well served by broader market interest - or App centric mirages of "digital nativism"...)
https://slate.com/business/2014/03/postal-banking-usps-can-and-should-start-offering-financial-services.html
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/14/5989767/postal-banking-questions
Ehh..kinda...I don't see the benefit of actual cash transactions or other banking services besides ID at the post office. Leave that part online and for the fed to handle…cash will disappear shortly.
Low cost existing infra to piggyback on (in both IT sense and in extended no-extra-builds physical brancing), and provides platform for no-frills low-cost basic banking for lowest incomes and/or bank-dislikers.
Global comparatives show it's a useful complement to normal banking services, and insofar as if one does it in a manner that rides mostly on existing infra (IT and physical), if done right adds a diversifying revenue stream to postal service while having basic service (esp. rural) offer.
I wouln't personally care that much to campaign for it, but as a perfeclty proven out idea, that normally wouldn't cost taxpayers extra, it's well founded
I agree with the idea of low cost no frills basic banking. But to my mind mucking about with physical cash is exactly the kind of thing like offering notary services that will soon be a relatively niche use case that adds substantial costs -- now you need enough security to protect all that cash -- without benefiting the majority of people.
I have nothing against letting the post office charge a fee for cash transactions and offer them if that turns out to be profitable but I can't imagine how that could be true in 10 or 15 years. You could just allow people to use their ID card as a debit card from their government bank account (whether you call it postal or fed) to cover the vast majority of use cases.
Probably there are enough people scared of digital cash that offering cash services might be popular even if money losing and I'm not opposing that but I'm not endorsing it either (seems fine to me if we leave the account and moving money in/out with the fed/treasury).
For clarity in understanding: Low cost existing infra refers to... infrastructure, not services.
The Post Office already has part of such services (postal money orders etc although the urbane urbanite class are blissfully unware of such things). The infrastructure is there.
Post office platform as both physical branching network that is already existing to address low-banked / unbanked for set of basic services that under modern KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money-Laundering) that are unattractive to almost all commercial banks to offer (pain-in-the-ass factor for the banks unprofitable given their other optoins for deployment- this is Federal regulation).
The naive idea US Treasury account is just not understanding multiple levels of what is needed for retail banking and payment services, which simply US Treastury is not set0-up for and would require signficant investment.
On other hand Post Bank infrastructure and model is at once well-proven and the marginal activation requirement for such a model based on current infrastructure including existing handling systems is an additional, not a whole new approach.
Now one can take a view that fuck-it, the cash and low-doc segment of society (new immigrants, elderly, lower-income just-getting-byers, etc) can just lump it - I don't particularly have a great personal interest or committment - but as a policy solution that is a well proven one and if one takes inspiration from proven models, the existing physical and IT infrastructure in the system is a readily usable base for little marginal cost.
The other side of this is cash deposit balances in aggregate at scale is a form of capital float that would not be trivial - and economically potentially interesting (Banks despite what retail consumers think do not make principal return on their assets based on charging you fees, it's intermediation).
Because the US Treasury does not have branches everywhere. In fact it basically has none. And to have convenient Retail reach one should have a large physical branch footprint.
Postal Banks globally exist because they're very practical
the physical infrastructure is there, and in modern postal operations including their existing financial products, even the base financial plumbing is there.
Anything truly complex in financial plumbing can of course be lodged at the US Treasury.
No, you;'re wrong.
If you are providing basic services to low-banked / not comfortable not-college educated class - i.e. not you - then you absolutely want retail reach - that's why branching of community banks exists, as well as why the retail reach of payment services, cash transfers services in low-income areas (and immigrant areas) is huge.
Retail reach piggy backing on existing infra (that is if you haven't quite understood, actual existing Post Offices that already have many payment features, where one can do Postal Money Orders and the like arleady) is absolutely rational.
It's not particularly hard, Postal Banks are really pretty standard in Rest of World.
Because people occasionally want to talk to a person at the bank while putting in or taking out cash or checks. If there were another government agency that already had a location convenient to every single person, we could use that instead. But the post office is the only one, as far as I know.
US Treasury is not set up for retail operations amigo - your solution is utterly wrong from top to bottom. Treasury is set-up in broad manner to interact with the banking backbone.
US Postal Service with its existing old fashioned payments products like the still existing postal money order etc is set-up for small retail payments and money operations, cash and non-cash.
One would be collossally stupid to give a retail mandate to US Treasury.
Of course if one wants to be autistic and ignore the whole Rest of World for some pecular ideological reason yes, inist on a non-retail agency to do retail... and then have to set-up a whole new infrastructure, IT etc.
Why you are banging on about 'propping up" post-offices escapes me.
Because it once existed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_System], and it's also a way to give USPS new business. But I agree with you in essence.
Lol, this just screams “ignorance of how much stuff actually relies on the Post Office.”
Good luck with that. It’s crazy that people distrust their own government but are fine with powerful, unaccountable private companies having power over them.
It's SOO much worse than that. They allow the government to pass laws requiring those private companies to spy on us and -- without the usual due process protections the government has to follow -- check to see if we are trying to do something illegal and stop us.
How should we handle doctors who might be running a pill mill? Should we have the DEA, who have the records of all their controlled substance prescriptions and all their licensing info investigate that doctor using their subpeona powers if necessary? Nah, they would have too many rights let's instead tell pharmacies they are liable if they fill suspicious prescriptions even though they won't have any system for appealing decisions and will profile people to do it.
Don't get me started on the KYC laws in banking.
I mean the DEA does investigate doctors, but way too late, usually. The pharmacists’ “corresponding responsibility” is ridiculous though, who the fuck am I to know whether you’re truly in pain or not, I’m in no way trained to assess that. Life is pain, bruh
Thank God for electronic prescribing, though. It is so much better now than just a few years ago now that I at least know that the scripts I receive aren’t forgeries. Most even come with a diagnosis attached!
Oooooooof
Private companies can't send men with guns to my house to imprison and/or kill me. Mostly, they target me with slightly better ads (and, in the future, price discrimination).
It is very rational to be more worried about state surveillance than private data gathering.
that world would be a better and more convenient one that privacy advocates would never allow us to have
I've thought about that argument. But, I believe that the information the government needs to know about its people to run a national id system, the government probably already knows anyway.
"Knows" in a lot of disparate unconnected ways. That was one thing DOGE was trying to do.
Given how Trump is weaponizing the government, would you really want that?
Is it politically homeless to have the view that monocause Advocates/Activists of all stripes, LEft, Right, should be sent to reeducation camps?
There is only one issue that matters and it's limiting the influence of monocausal activists. Everything else will be fixed if we just solve that one singular issue.
yes... but then .... one becomes a monocausal activists doesn't one....?
that'sthejoke.gif
I think privacy advocates would love a well-designed version which would actually increase privacy (eg age verification w/o leaving PII behind). Don't confuse them with nutters who think id cards are the number of the beast.
In fact I expect it would be groups like the FBI who would be more worried because the ability to prove you have various properties like your age would probably also allow me and Bob Last name to use it to establish that I really am taking to someone named Bob Lastname on signal. In other words it fills in the missing authentication in e2e encryption.
The thing is you need to design that in from the outset and that takes some care and often — because the people who want to stop kids from seeing porn often wish to stop adults too — overcoming political opposition.
Don’t we already do this in Europe, though linking a national ID to a bank account? Or is the extra bit a government to run bank account?
Sounds like a nightmare... I'll stick with what privacy I can eek thank you.
What privacy are you losing? The government has an ID for you...like your SSN, passport and driver's license? That you are able to prove you actually posses that ID rather than just uploading an image as your bank already requires? You only gained protection against forgery.
And if we are going to have laws about what kids can access online being able to prove you are of age without saying who you are is incredibly privacy protective.
Know your customer laws mean that the government is already up in your banking buisness and the government runs the ACH system already so it's lnot changing anything about what they know.
Except maybe they're connecting things they "know" but aren't currently connected.
Palintr is already working on that so I don't see how this program makes any difference. In fact, it would likely help because congress usually adds special riders (such as with social security numbers) limiting the ability to collate or connect certain data when they create programs like this. The very fact that you get a government bank account will probably increase your privacy since it will make it more salient to the voter.
You do not have any.
It’s insane to me that people believe that the nsa does not already have all this data.
I always LOL at this take.
IF America had a Stasi, and it kept a file on each of the 330-some million people in this country, I guarantee you that 99.9999% of those files (including yours) would say "Utterly unremarkable. Surveillance unwarranted."
You are BORING to your government.
Except when you aren't. And those files would also be super useful when it turned out that some previously-boring guy needed to be audited/discredited/jailed.
we're already living in a privacy dystopia! Corporations can give us slightly more targeted advertisements, and now you're saying you want the government to provide services to us more effectively??
No, it exists but thankfully isn't interconnected so any benefit is just theoretical at this point.
Bonus is that the government is able to borrow all that money for free
Internet weirdos clamor for "zero-trust" solutions, which is an idea that satisfies terrible impulses.
If you want to protect youth from things like porn without violating adult speech and privacy rights you need the same thing you have in person: the ability to have the shopkeeper check your age without easily writing down your info.
India had great success with this and most of continental Europe has some version that helps makes things a bit more efficient.
But at no cost to the person.
"No cost to the person?" Who pays, then? Consider your answer carefully.
The average person pays. For 80ish% of people, the only difference between the person paying and the average person paying is whether you need to engage in a financial transaction at the moment of getting your card. But for a small percent of people it actually makes a difference to whether they can enter the system.
There are likely also efficiencies of scale with managing payments through the tax system rather than requiring an extra infrastructure for tracking payments at point of service.
The federal government already runs the ACH clearinghouse and the federal reserve banking system. The cost for the banking is essentially a web portal.
You need to get government IDs already and since you can have it double as a passport you might even get some efficiencies if you can close down the state department passport offices.
Yep. Kevin Drum used to make this case frequently and forcefully (and convincingly in my view).
https://jabberwocking.com/we-should-issue-free-national-id-cards-to-everyone/
Yes, it is the government’s job to authenticate you, if ever the government had a job that would be it
The identifying information should also be changeable in case of fraud. You can prove your identity some other way, like showing up in person with your face and fingerprints, and get a new ID card with a new number. That way it's also more secure than a social security number.
I just want my embedded microchip so I can stop lugging a wallet around
Amen
Years ago, I tried to buy a beer at a Celtics game and use my Virginia state ID. They would only take driver's licenses as ID, which was stupid.
"Sir, if you're going to enjoy this crisp Sam Adams you better be driving home"
In Lousianna, up through at least about 1990, at 18 you could buy alcohol in a bar to drink on the premises, but couldn't buy alcohol at a store to drink at home until 21. The official rationalle was that there would be other people around (e.g., the bartender) who would be keeping tabs on you and helping you behave responsibly (FWIW, my experience was not consistent with this). We used to figure it was OK for 18 year olds to drink, but only if they were going to drive afterwards.
Last I checked Louisiana has daiquiri drive-thrus, which are even more on the nose. Here's a 15% ABV beverage that fits in your cupholder. Make sure you don't take the tape off the lid until you get home ;p
That was possibly the weirdest actually-enforced MA law - you can't use out-of-state IDs to buy alcohol. (It changed last year.)
Technically, you could - but it wasn't considered reasonable for sellers to rely on out-of-state IDs, and the fines for selling alcohol to someone ineligible who didn't present a "reasonably reliable" ID were high, so most sellers required an in-state ID.
https://www.hamiltonma.gov/commonwealth-of-massachusetts-identification-to-purchase-alcohol/
On one hand that's goofy, on the other hand everyone in college that had a fake ID had one from like, Idaho or something because bouncers didn't know what a real Idaho license looked like. So I kinda get it.
Huh, I never had a problem with this the times I visited MA. I only think I bought booze by the drink at bars/event venues, though--not in a store.
Absolutely agree, and very much in the spirit of the post. Although I would go further and say that all sorts of government and corporate data collection is good. It makes like easier and more pleasant for people, and as the world gets more complex, it would be better to have more of it. As an example, it's constantly annoying to make sure that all the various healthcare providers/insurers have all your info.
The actual privacy concerns with this kind of data collection should be handled by better encryption/IT and making companies liable for screwups. Banks/CCs have seemingly figured out how to let you use your money incredibly easily and yet deal with fraud/privacy, many other systems should do the same. Or even better, there's should be one (or a few) digital identity management services that handle all of these things. Either through government or privately.
On my phone I have a Digital ID, passport verified. Easy and at no cost to me. However, I doubt I will ever be asked to use it. I have tried to use my Maryland Digital License at TSA several times, but only get weird looks from the agents and hostile stares ( I assume) from the folks behind me! But maybe sometime, this will be the way to go.
One thing that always makes me enraged at our system is traveling to Europe. I went through a spell at work where I had to fly to Europe several times a year. It was so much easier going through passport control at Heathrow as an American than it was going through passport control when arriving back in the US.
US passport control has been absurdly easy for me (US citizen with Global Entry). I don't think I've even handed my passport to a human the past several times I've come back to the US by air.
Yeah it's easier if you have global entry (I don't) but that's kinda the point. Global Entry requires a lot of time to actually get approved (and some people, like me, get denied for very silly and capricious reasons....) so only really worth it if you are a frequent international traveller. Meanwhile EU countries just make it easy for everyone (or at least everyone from countries with biometric data embedded in their passports). Why do I have to go through this elaborate process and pay $100 (well, my CC company pays but I'm still paying one way or another) to get treated the same way I get treated in a foreign country in my own country!?
leaving aside the absurdly easy ways to waltz through U.S. passport control, you don't outgoing passport control in the U.S., you only have to deal with it once a trip, not twice like Schengen (and most of the rest of the world).
huh? you literally just say I'm here (and take a selfie) on the global entry app when you've landed back in the U.S. And if you don't have global entry (which would be weird for a frequent traveler), just use the mobile passport app and you still fast track the line. You clearly haven't traveled in years.
I don't have global entry. I went through the whole process of filling out their very long application, found it almost impossible to get an appointment for the interview and finally did get one because I was returning from an international trip and you can just show up at the office at the airport. But then they denied me because I had a misdemeanor on my record from 20 years ago.
But the broader point is that, yeah its much easier if you have global entry, but even getting global entry requires hours of time invested and $100 and so probably not worth it unless you are a frequent international traveller. Meanwhile I can waltz in to a European airport as a foreign national and fly through passport control without a hitch.
Mobile passport app dude. Seriously. Also European passport control ease varies dramatically airport to airport. (Source: 12-20 international trips per year.)
I do have it but doesn't help at all at the airports I generally fly into from overseas trips (Dulles or O'Hare), you just have to wait in line there.
We already have a national ID system that's been smuggled in through the back door. Real ID is a national federated database that allows for fifty state IDs that are all constructed according to a national minimum standard, and (thanks to the miracle of technology) the 50 resulting databases can be searched/used by government agencies in a manner that mimics a single combined database.
A big technocracy blackpill for me is learning that SSNs were intentionally made insecure because there was a fear that banks, businesses, and government would use them as a quasi-national-ID otherwise, and then they did anyway despite them being literally sequential and as insecure as possible.
No that’s a horrible idea and we shouldn’t let the government be able to track people that easily. It’s upstream of lots and lots of terrible ideas and policies and is culturally unworkable to boot - no Anglosphere country has mandatory ids.
And we already have something that could easily function as a national ID for US citizens: passport cards.
Members of Congress should be paid a lot more. Considering that Congress hasn't given itself a pay raise in nearly 20 years shows that this idea is not popular. Many of my coworkers believe that members of Congress are paid too much as it is. Do we really expect members of Congress to work solely out of their own goodwill and sense of duty?
You can add “increase the number of professional staff members” to your list. It’s not a perfect solution but it seems to me to be a necessary way to reduce the power of lobbyists & the congressional leadership.
It’s amazing to me how hard it is to convince people that increasing salaries for Congressmen, senators and staffers would actually decrease how many rich people work in Congress and how much “millionaires and billionaires” have influence over legislation
Running for office is a full-time job, even for state-level jobs.
A candidate for state house I know is spending 20+ hours a week meeting constituents. He has a job but it's on hold so not paying him. His wife keeps the household running. All this to get a job that runs about half the year and pays $14,000. The dream is to be speaker of the state house, that's a princely sum of $38,000.
I think it's an underrated reason why a lot of State legislatures end up having a disproportionate number of members with extreme view or lets be frank, absolute lunatics.
I suspect a lot of "normal" people are put off by risk/reward aspect of running for office in part due to the money issue.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike what Newt Gingrich has done to America but an underrated one was his changes to the institution of Congress itself and how much he gutted money that goes to staffers.
I'm frustrated by this talking point. Not to say that Newt didn't do it, but that Democrats have held Congress multiple times since then and could have restored that fairly easily. That they haven't suggests that its more institutional/bipartisan than "Newt did it."
In my opinion, reducing the capabilities of Congress made the system more dependent on the leadership of the chamber, and both parties' leaders like that.
It's a prisoner's dilemma in which the Republicans are walking around wearing giant signs saying "we will defect at every opportunity." No way Dems are taking the political hit of raising Congress's budget if Reps will just gut it again when they're next in power.
You sound like a Republican saying that Democrats make them do things.
Beyond that, there is no political hit to this. This doesn't make the top 100 things that any voter in the US cares about.
I don't think this is politically homeless in the same way Matt's ideas are though. It sounds like something Dems would *want* to support but think would just leave them too vulnerable to attack.
Yes, I'd be fine with both but I would choose the staffers first, and it might be more politically palatable too, since staffers don't evoke the "Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again! What a bunch of clowns" reaction as much as politicians do.
There are already something like 18,000 people working for congress. That seems excessive.
One worker in Congress for every 20,000 residents does not strike me as a particularly high ratio. To say the least. Most House members have tiny staffs relative to the amount of work they do.
We'd do a lot better to redirect all of the immense manpower that's wasted on our (I am not making this number up) 90,000 mostly pointless busybody local governments into national policymaking.
No cities of fewer than 200k would be a nice start.
“…18,000 people working for congress. That seems excessive”
Sounds low to me.
Consider: The Architect of the Capitol alone has about 2,700 employees, and none of them are congressional staffers. Capitol Hill includes well over 18 million square feet of buildings, or nearly 3 Pentagons worth of space. That encompasses the Capitol itself (about 1.5M sq ft), office buildings (8-9M sq ft), a small subway system connecting the offices to the Capitol, the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court (6M), the US Botanical Garden, a massive central plant (that until fairly recently had an enormous pile of coal on the other side of 695 with a system of conveyors to move the coal to the main boiler), and, probably most importantly, a small staff that raises and lowers US flags over the Capitol—up and down all day long—to give away to favored constituents nicely boxed with a certificate of authenticity (also sold in the employee store, or used to be).
It’s a massive undertaking. But the US is a massive country.
Why the fetish for hiring and paying bureaucrats. I have no need to have a para social relationship with my congressman. He needs a secretary and no staff beyond that. The idea that a congressional office should have policy staff is ludicrous. That’s what committee staff are for.
We appear to have 3-5x as much legislative staff per legislator as peer countries. Yikes
CRS, GAO, CBO, Library, Capitol Police)~18,000 (personal + committee + leadership)~30,000~34 (excl. agencies)United Kingdom650 MPs + ~800 peers~3,100 (Commons + Parliamentary Digital Service); Lords adds some~3,500 (IPSA-funded MP staff)~6,600~10Canada343 MPs + 105 senators~1,800 (House Administration FTE)~1,000–1,400 (MP office staff, ~3–4 per MP)~3,000~9France577 deputies (+ 348 senators, separate)~1,400 (Assembly civil servants/contractors)~2,000 (deputies' parliamentary assistants)~3,400~6
“Why the fetish for hiring and paying bureaucrats”
Don’t look at me. If I ran things the executive branch would be cut 95% or more, not including the functions properly belonging to the federal government. I’d move all the remaining rule making bureaucracy to Congress.
How does that break down by job type?
My even more unpopular opinion is all the rule-making bureaucrats in executive branch agencies should actually work directly for Congress, helping craft legislation. Republicans don't like this because it would require spending money on Congress and for Congress to, you know, occasionally do something. Democrats don't like this because their unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat friends would no longer be free to make laws.
The workaround of delegated rulemaking authority arose because forcing every policy change to go through the insanely inefficient bicameralism-and-presentment process, with its triple veto points, leads to a government that is perpetually paralyzed by partisan deadlock.
What we really need in this regard is a constitution that doesn't suck, but I'm afraid that's not really an option, so delegated rulemaking it is.
Agreed; but there's no reason it has to be delegated to the executive. Say we had regulatory bodies established by Congress, with governing boards serving staggered terms and appointed by majority vote in either the Senate or the House; regulations written by those bodies would have the force of law unless Congress overrode them or the courts ruled they had exceeded their authority.
That would require either a total reversal of extant Supreme Court precedent (I'm not sure it would even get a single vote on the current Supreme Court; the decision establishing that Congress can't do things like that, INS v. Chadha, was 7-2 back in 1984 with Bill Brennan and Thurgood Marshall in the majority) or a constitutional amendment.
I'm not opposed as a matter of institutional design-- it sounds like what they have in Westminster System countries, and I think it would be vastly preferable to what we have now-- but it's incompatible with the US constitutional structure.
"Democrats don't like this because their unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat friends would no longer be free to make laws."
Republican presidents like their unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat friends making laws too. Especially the current one.
This is sort of interesting because if you're familiar with the right wing arguments downstream of unitary executive theory, right wingers are arguing agencies and their staff are already creatures of Congress rather than the president.
In theory, sure, because Congress created them, but that isn't how it works in reality.
In fairness they all seem to be getting some kind of de facto pass on what looks to everyone else like insider trading.
If the compensation for being a legislator is low salary but high freedom to invest on insider info, that is the perfect recipe for getting rich people to want the job and no one else. Ban the trading and raise their pay, and then it becomes a good deal for a middle class person.
Yes to clarify I didn't mean it was a good thing!
They are not particularly good at it (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272722000044), and the whole affair smacks of stupidity.
My understanding is most analysis is done on self-reported trades, which are far from comprehensive. Eg Nancy Pelosi reports all her (husband’s) trading activity, but most don’t.
Also high-level appointees at agencies like NIH, whose pay is capped at a fraction of what they would be earning as full professors at an R1 medical school, while having vastly more responsibility. It's insane.
Are you suggesting MDs who run multi-billion organizations for $225,000 are underpaid in their government sinecures? They could never hack it outside of government.
This, but state lawmakers. They’re pitifully underpaid and part time, meaning the only people making state laws are rich people and retirees
I actually think state legislatures should be part time. States are smaller and have fewer moving parts. The full-time California legislature is so bored they go out of their way to do a bunch of inane things.
Most corporations are much smaller than states, and yet they seem to find something to do with the time of full-time employees!
FWIW I think a state legislature would be more akin to a corporate board of directors.
Hard disagree. State legislatures need to be full-time and professionalized. You shouldn't get rich off the gig, but I would say mandating that legislators' salaries be set at whatever the median salary in that state is + a per diem for legislators who have to commute more than X miles to get to the Capitol is a good thing.
The issue is actually less pay to members per se (though that should be raised somewhat) and more pay to staff, which is awful and not competitive even with the Executive Branch much less the private sector. It's preposterous how skinflint our legislative branch is when it comes to paying for good policymaking.
But, like many of the ideas here, this is just Republicans starving government services and Dems being politically intimidated into not doing the right thing because it's easily demagogued.
Congress needs to fund itself properly across the board. Higher salaries for Congresspeople, more staffers, better paid staffers, and policy research resources all need to be properly funded for Congress to do its job effectively.
An underfunded, ineffective Congress inevitably cedes power to the executive and the courts. This is not how our Constitution is supposed to work. Congress should worry less about what the public thinks of how much they get paid, and worry more about enabling themselves to get the governance results that the people want.
You have the power of the purse, Congress. Fund yourselves.
Members of Congress get paid a fine amount—$174,000 is already well into the top 10% of salaries. Saying that getting paid that much is just working out of goodwill and duty is kind of insulting to most people. There is dignitary value in knowing that the people who rule us aren’t also making unfathomable amounts of money. They shouldn’t have it all.
You made a weird and bad faith pas de deux going from "they shouldn't be paid less than a first year associate at a Big Law firm" to "so you mean they should be paid unfathomable amounts of money?"
There's a massive amount of monetary space between those two options. Collapsing them is bad.
The big disconnect here is that, for the sort of people who typically become Congresspeople and the sort of people who typically know Congresspeople, $174,000 doesn't sound like a lot of money. For the average voter, it sounds like a ton, because the average voter is paid $62,000 (median earnings).
I suspect if you asked the average voter what CEOs should be paid, you'd get an answer in the range of $500,000-$1,000,000 a year - and they'll probably tell you that no-one should earn more than 50K in their first year of work, regardless of what they do (ie first-year associates should be on 50K or so, and they'll get to 100K in about five years).
The problem here is that voters have the ability to set Congressional pay as if the economy had the pay distribution they would like it to have, but they can't shape the whole economy to have that pay distribution, which rather leaves Congress in the cold.
Also voters wouldn't support the sort of interventions needed to make the private sector set pay the way they think it should. It isn't even a "will the ends but not the means" thing, it's just not something they've really ever thought about properly, but there are a lot of people who think that since they are paying taxes, no-one being paid out of those taxes should earn a lot more than they personally earn. It's not systematic, it's not thought-through, it's just "two hundred grand is way too much money, it's more than three times what I get paid".
Voters emphatically do not have the ability to set Congressional pay. Congress sets its own pay, and the voters' only input is to throw out a Congressman who voted to increase pay. The fact that Congress has chosen to bypass their annual cost-of-living increase since 2009 says unmistakably that Congressmen think the voters will throw them out of office if their pay increases -- and the voters will, too.
Congress ranks below used car salesmen in public esteem, and nobody's campaigning to raise the salaries of used car salesmen.
And yet, used car salesmen often make a lot more than congresspeople!
Let's be real. 90%+ of used cars salemen don't make what congress does.
That says nothing about whether Congress should be paid more.
I know Congresspeople and make double that but it is still a lot of money. If someone offered me a seat in Congress I’d take the pay cut to do it in a heartbeat. In fact lots of Congresspeople spend lots of their own money to get elected. Once you’re making that much you can already afford basically all the creature comforts a normal person wants and you’re just using extra money to try to shape the world anyway, and you can shape the world more as a Congressperson than you could even as someone making a seven-figure salary.
I bet 99% of first year associates at big law firms would happily trade places with members of Congress. It’s a crappy job and that’s why they have to get paid a lot. Being a member of Congress is an extremely powerful job and it offends people’s egalitarian sensibilities for it to also be extremely well-paid.
The average House member spends 50% of their time just on raising money for the next election, never mind all the travel involved. I doubt most associates would like that. If they did they would've gone into sales.
It's wild that half of a House members job is esssentially doing the same thing an entry level SDR does.
This is why I have to think it *should* be plausible to get a constitutional amendment passed changing House terms to four years on a 50-50 staggered basis (so there are still House elections every two years, but only half the House is up for a vote), but I've never heard of anyone in power even proposing such an idea . . . .
You get to vote on the laws governing the most powerful organization to have ever existed in the known universe. Most people would love it. We rarely see Congresspeople resign unless they have to and there are lots of 70+ year olds holding on until they die. The vast majority of junior big law firm associates are trying to get out ASAP and do not work in law firms until they are 70.
I think it’s well attested that when people are given power without sufficient pay, it selects for low-skill people without better options, who are willing to leverage that power for financial gain. At best, you get people who are already well off, so they are solely motivated by acquiring power.
If we want to have legislators with skills, we have to pay for those skills, right? Paying for good work is good! It makes the hiring pool way bigger and it dilutes the influence of private money.
While we’re fantasizing though, I think this works even better with sortition, but that will have to wait for USA 4.0
Luckily places like the Revolving Door Project make it even less appealing for people with useful skills to go into congress, since they'll be sellout shills if they get a job after!
Well-attested where? If only low-skill people without better options join Congress, then getting elected should be a breeze right? I don’t think that’s the case—getting into Congress is extremely competitive and there is no shortage of people who jump into competitive races.
They have to maintain two households, one of them in a VHCOL city.
They should live in their home districts and get compensated for their expenses when they travel to DC like private sector workers who travel a lot.
That would cost more. Once someone is spending c.100 nights in a single place, it's cheaper to rent or buy full-time than to pay for hotels or short-stay rentals.
What the government should do is buy a property in DC (which the Congressperson chooses, within a government-set budget), let the Congressperson live in it rent-free while they are in Congress, and then sell it when they leave. That's easily the cheapest way to do it, as the increase in value accrues to the government, not to the Congressperson. At the moment, they take on a mortgage on a property in DC, and if they stay in Congress long enough to pay that mortgage off (or even a substantial part of it), they can sell up when they leave and make a significant profit from doing so.
I know people sometimes suggest building an apartment building for Congress, but that would be much more expensive than just letting them pick one on the open market for a fair price and then having the Federal Government buy it - because concentrating all of them in one place would create a security risk that having them spread all over DC doesn't.
I bet there’s a way to do it that doesn’t require buying and selling properties every couple years - just have some office of congressional housing own a portfolio of properties, and have a process of selecting houses, the way many colleges have a draft for dorms or whatever.
And itemize everything, too! In triplicate!
What a dumbass idea. Just pay people money.
We've already solved this problem with our military folks. Pay them a salary, and then pay them a separate housing allowance. If your housing allowance is $2000 a month and you find a place for $1800, great, you pocket the leftover $200. If your standards demand a $2500/mo place, fine, you pay the extra $500 out of your salary.
I would hope that raising the salary of members of congress would have at least some impact of making them less corruptible. At very least, it would increase the cost of the gifts and perks the lobbyists would have to offer to make a material difference to them.
And, even if congressional salaries were raised to something like $500,000, that's still not an unfathomable amount of money. The rich people who lobby Congress for tax breaks make over 100x that.
The idea that Congress rules us is itself laughable. If you're a Republican congressman, your entire job is to show up three days a week, have lunch with your fellow Republican congressmen, and occasionally vote "no" on something. If you're a Democratic congressman, your entire job is to complain about the Republican congressmen until you die in office at the age of 112.
I worry this would further entrench the Boeberts of the world who treat Congress as the most lucrative job they are likely to ever have. $180k is a pretty great salary, but it's also highly likely a former congressperson could make more outside of Congress. And maybe that helps with positive churn
I expect Boebert will make more money in her next role as a Fox News (or Newsmax, or OANN) talking head.
Yeah, if you are a Republican House member, your career incentives are to get elected, stay in office long enough to get a reputation as a loudmouth nut case, then leverage that reputation to get promoted to talking head which is your only way to get a raise
She can't put the vape down for long enough to run a segment
Boebert is the best congressperson tho
beetlejuice beetlejuice BEETLEJUICE
The late great comic Jackie Mason had the idea to deal with the budget deficit - put Congress on commission. If the government doesn’t turn a profit, they don’t get paid!
I don't think that would work during a recession.
Add a zero to the salary of congressmen and staffers.
Proper Congressional Apportionment as well please!
"What does this job pay?"
"Nuthin'."
"D'oh!"
"Unless you're crooked."
"Woo-hoo!"
https://youtu.be/cyeUGo1k1R4?si=D7csS8shYsppRAXN&t=129
Another politically dead idea is bringing back and investing heavily in institutions or asylums for the mentally ill. Conservatives love to talk about getting the crazies off the street. There is nowhere to put them - we can’t jail them permanently for being homeless, and not in the general population. Liberals love to talk about helping them in a way that preserves their agency and rights. Some of them are too ill for that to work.
We don't have the jail space to do it permanently either and it's preferable not putting schizophrenic in with general pop in any case.
This stuff costs money. I wonder how much cash the average schmuck would be willing to shell out to not have people sleeping in doorways and talking to spirits?
Edit: I think I'd be fine with $100/mo; but not to some homelessness charity, just to fund a system that incarcerates vagrant nutters.
It does cost a lot of money, but probably a net financial benefit, keeping someone on the streets is incredibly expensive in terms of healthcare and police time.
It would probably also help make people more willing to invest in businesses in neighborhoods that no longer had crazy people pooping in it.
I wish I still trusted the type of people who do studies, because the amount of second order spending/decrease in income we've had over this issue does seem like it could start to approach the cost of just doing the asylums. On top of all the money going into the NGO borg, who is accounting for all the extra security at the library? Rebuilding the train station ten years early? Or the 50 guys who end up at the ER at the county hospital three nights week? De-needling vacant lot after vacant lot every week for ten years? Fire response?
The only thing that’s changed about the kind of people who do studies is your trust. The system has always worked by long-run debates and attempted replications, not because of the perfection of individuals or the absence of field-wide fads.
I think you overestimate the fundamental sanity of your social sciences peers.
It is hard to know if it has got worse or detection got better but the replication crisis has shown that lots of people were faking or manipulating their studies.
The thing that's changed is the shutting down of long-run debates.
So no, a lack of trust is a very reasonable approach to a system that eliminated it's own correction mechanism. It'll come back, but it won't be fast, or easy.
What correction mechanism used to exist that has gone away? Did you have false beliefs about there being an extra correction mechanism that never actually existed?
Never is a long time. If you mean that it hasn't existed for longer then I appreciated, that seems true.
But asylums existed, and still exist in other countries, they are not unknowable. And some mental health interventions have been found that work to some degree.
Still, that seems to be a big argument for doing most policies based on vibes and intuition, which will usually be correct, rather than data which will basically always be bad. Especially policies like “what should be done about homelessness”
Why would vibes and intuition be more likely to be right than data? Just because one thing has a higher error rate than people assumed doesn’t mean it’s higher than the alternatives!
Most social science data, especially anything that might influence policy, is intrinsically untrustworthy due to motivated reasoning, so there’s not even really much of a point in going off anything more than vibes, especially when the “data” contradicts your lying eyes
That's probably true!
Yeah, the core problem with institutionalization is that unless you're just warehousing people in feces-stained dungeons (which has its own... obvious... issues) it costs a metric ass-tonne of money, and it's questionable to say the least whether the outcomes are worth it.
This is such a values-driven issue that I wish the more expensive options could be opt-in somehow—like through targeted taxes or rich donors. Most people can agree there’s a moral dimension here, but how much you’re willing to spend on uncertain claims about the welfare of severely mentally ill people varies a lot from person to person.
I guess it's already kind of that way, because different states and cities fund things differently, but maybe large states or private institutions could attempt to make it more explicit.
I've seen a lot of back and forth on this debate, but I've not seen particularly convincing evidence that moving from outpatient to inpatient care as a base model is particularly useful, given similar levels of investment.
I think going from "Eh, crazy guy ranting on the street who periodically assaults old ladies, not our problem" to "This guy has to be under some kind of treatment and supervision, how shall we do it?" is the big improvement. I don't know what that ultimately looks like, except it's not leaving people to freeze to death on the streets or letting them go around craping on the ground or assaulting people until they run out of luck and end up dead.
My knowledge of this is informed by Scott Alexander’s piece below. It seems like it hard to get people reliable and continuous outpatient care.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in
I had understood Alexander to be against imprisoning people for mental illness. Either way, I would guess if you had enough money to create and fill prisons for the mentally ill, and instead spent it on more stringent outpatient care, you'd be more effective.
Yeah, I would be in favor of anything that works that society can afford. I don’t like the term “prison” in this framing. Being mentally ill is not a crime or offense of any kind. In an ideal world, institutions provide a safe and comfortable environment for the severely ill or schizophrenic who have no other means of support. But it seems many on the right seem to have a disgust response to the mentally ill and would not mind if they were locked up in prison-like conditions.
Love all of these. In the spirit of piece, I'll add my own: taxes on vehicle miles traveled (as well as all highways as toll roads) to replace the ineffectual gas tax. Would people hate it? Absolutely, it would never happen! It would probably force people onto surface streets in the short term (which is why you'd need to tax all miles traveled).
But tolling would (a) cause people to drive less, (b) force governments to think harder about which highways to build/expand/retire.
I dunno. In my area, the people with the longest commutes are lower- middle income people who can’t afford to live in the city. They already suffer from the longer commute and greater gas expenditure, and can’t work from home or easily cut back on their driving in other ways. I wouldn’t want to penalize them further.
That's because it's illegal to build the housing they need in the city. Everyone's commutes could be shorter if we stopped letting NIMBYs run the show.
It would be really easy with modern tech to give poor people a discount on tolls (no one else would even need to know!) just like some cities do for bus passes, but I never hear anyone talk about this.
Then they could get lower income/payroll tax burdens or better/cheaper government services. The desire to make every little policy "progressive" is what has destroyed our ability to make good granular policy.
Make the big stuff (income/payroll/sales/property tax) progressive, and make it more progressive if you can, but let's tax negative externalities like driving or alcohol or gambling, even if poor people do more of those on average.
The people who suffer most from underfunded roads and undertaxed driving are also lower income people! These are the people who bear the brunt of the negative impacts *both* of current policy and improved policy. You don’t just get to point to them to protect the status quo.
So tax the value of the cars people own. Call it the "Jay Leno Tax."
We do this already - my wife pays more for her car registration than me
The people who suffer the most from any policy change are the poor, unless you write in specific exemptions. Poor people's behavior is easier to change than rich people's behavior (because you change behavior by introducing friction, and money can be used to reduce friction).
Roads are a really expensive line item for local and state agencies; we also should really be sunsetting roads with less heavily traveled. You can say this is unfair to more rural people and it is but they are eating up a disproportionate amount of money relative to the amount of revenue created and are loss leaders.
Honestly, my unpopular opinion in the theme of these is that we should really be using more sub-urban and urban new housing to re-home the disaffected MAGA voters dying deaths of despair.
It's foolish to try to give enough money to each small town and locality to produce more jobs for them but we can definitely get them more housing in more urban areas (eventually). This would lead to greater avg worker productivity and to closer alignment with political democracy on the margins.
I think my most unpopular opinion is "ghost towns are good; better to empty the place out when there's no longer an economic use for it than to have people hanging on with an entire economy running on subsidies from elsewhere"
Genuinely an unpopular opinion. Bravo
The hyperfragmentation of local government that your comment sort of implies (to me!) is also a problem.
I'll add usage taxes on city roads. Congestion charges are sort of there, but it shouldn't be a "daily fee to enter the city," it should be more like a "hourly fee per city block." If we get self-driving cars these are going to be essential. (Slowly driving around the block instead of parking is insane for a person, but doable for a robot.)
Oh, let me add: no free parking. That one's homeless. I hate paying for parking so I understand why no one wants to be for it.
Free parking is fine at times and places where there’s a lot of vacancy. It was insane that in downtown Bryan, TX, they charged people $1 an hour to park in the big empty parking garage they built but left the street spots that everyone wanted totally free. But I guess people thought the point of prices is to pay for the thing, not to manage demand.
Perhaps my most libertarian take is 'all roads should be privatized' because then a lot of urban planning questions resolve themselves - how much should parking cost, are parking spaces or another travel lane better, should we convert an underused highway to housing a la Rochester, NY.
I see too much potential abuse to having one's property access be taken hostage by a private company, though.
As more ppl switch to EVs govts will have to switch to VMT fees bc the gas tax revenue will decline.
They don't *have* to, but any other funding would be a cross subsidy to heavy use motorist commuters at the expense of light use and non-motorist commuters. A use fee for government services makes the best sense here.
Well they’ll have to do SOMETHING is my point and VMT charges are a sensible alternative.
We agree there!
I don't they're sensible; I think they'd be almost impossible to administer fairly.
Increase registration fees based on Blue Book value. (Bonus: it's a progressive tax!)
As Richard mentioned upthread, that's a cross subsidy toward heavy commuters at the expense of light commuters, which doesn't strike me as ideal.
I think the concept of "heavy commuter" is punishment enough all by itself.
All taxes are flawed in some fashion. I'll take the progressivity of this tax over any benefit it gives to high mileage drivers.
They could make vehicle registration fees more expensive to compensate for gas tax revenue falling. That would effectively be a subsidy from low-mileage to high-mileage users, but would also be a strong incentive to low-mileage users to not have a car at all any more.
There needs to be viable ways for people to forgo cars, though.
The other options are to tax car registrations, or pay for roads out of the general fund.
This doesn’t create a strong correlation between use of the road and paying for the road’s upkeep, but roads are a necessary thing and need to be paid for one way or another.
I’ve long thought all restricted access highways should be tolled, especially now that we have remote tolling technology available.
Controlled access freeways are definitely the easiest to put use fees on, for sure. A total VMT use fee would still be easy to charge by just looking at the odometer, and a weight coefficient on at least the vehicle is easy to calculate, although it can't account for cargo as easily. The congestion coefficient is more difficult, though, becuase I worry that outside freeways that would require transponders, and people would lose their shit over that.
I agree just tolling highways isn’t as optimal, but in the near term it’s more practical.
Odometer VMT opens up state-level squabbles about who gets the revenue—is it fair that CT gets to keep a Fairfield commuter’s VMT revenue when they spend a significant amount of time driving in NY?
In any event, first step would be to repeal the toll ban on federally funded highways.
Hm, didn't think about that. But if not the odometer then I fear that's also going to require transponders.
Don't many cars have built-in GPS already? The data is being generated about where they are, and therefore how far they travel along a given road. You just need to give the information to the department of transportation.
No, most cars don't have built-in GPS, and most cars aren't the latest. That said, they do have portable GPS in the smartphones that people willingly carry with them.
And that's where people would freak out--"I don't want the government tracking where I'm going!!!!", even though it can be designed to just give the government the status of the road as being under one jurisdiction, or whether or not it's congested, and not precisely which road and where on the road the vehicle is.
WA sure seems to be going that route, but it’s mainly because it always builds the most expensive thing at all times
I'd prefer a tax on vehicle weight. That would have the benefit of also encouraging lighter and more efficient vehicles, as opposed to this never ending push for larger, more dangerous for pedestrians/cyclists/etc ones.
One quirk is that the batteries make EVs heavier. I still support it because it doesn't change the fact that's already been present that heavier vehicles wear out roads more.
That's still good imo. Most EV emissions come from the size of the battery, incentivizing people to choose smaller batteries is better for the environment.
Sure--in the short term it might incentivize people to stick with their ICEVs longer, though.
Sticking with an old car is probably better than getting a new car, even if you keep burning some gas!
Presumably we would keep the gas tax so that would still incentivize people to buy EVs but I take your point.
I'd actually like to abolish the gas tax now and replace it with a VMT use fee, with the weight and congestion coefficients if also possible. That gets people inured to what we should be paying for to fund roads, while also giving existing ICEV drives a short term political sop, until EVs become so good that there's no reason not to have one.
That's true. But, not by enough to matter in terms of road wear. Weight only starts to meaningfully impact road wear when you get into large commercial trucks, not passenger vehicles. The actual impact of batteries on weight in passenger vehicles is much less than this. For compact sedans, the extra weight from swapping in a battery for engine is no more than adding 4 adult passengers, and I'm yet to hear about anyone complaining about roads being torn up by vehicles used for carpools.
If the weight coefficient ends up being very small for passenger EVs, then great!
The gas tax is easy to levy and encourages more fuel efficient vehicles. It’s true that the tax isn’t very high, but the tax isn’t high for a reason which wouldn’t disappear if replaced.
A VMT tax would be so open to cheating and fraud. Good luck getting universal (and honest) reporting of how many miles you've driven.
My preference: replace gas taxes with an expanded annual license registration fee based on your car's Blue Book value.
Property taxes for cars!
Why not just raise the gasoline tax? The infrastructure is already there, no new tolling systems or accounting needed.
Eventually we want gasoline to not be the fuel for motor vehicles.
As an EV owner, that sounds great to me. Maybe not so good from a social justice point of view.
Taxes on miles driven is both politically viable and practical to implement. Tolls on highways is neither.
Wouldn't it be the opposite?
How would it be practical to implement?
It doesn't have to be perfect, any more than gas taxes are perfect. As a rough draft, require an annual mileage inspection. The mileage, tied to the VIN, gets reported to DMV, which assesses the tax. Have a registration category for people who think their circumstances are exceptional, where they can itemize milage.
It sounds pretty distant from perfection. I lease cars and haven't taken one in for inspection in I can't recall how long. And what if someone buys a new car and gets rid of the previous one eleven months since the last annual inspection? I guess they can "itemize mileage" in those cases, but would you believe their reported numbers?
You already renew your license every year and it's obvious the year and the make. Just say: "here's how much more you owe."
My biggest issue with your proposal is that it alters the "user pays" component of a gas tax. The more you drive, the more gas you buy; the gas taxes you pay go to maintain the roads you drive on. It's not perfect-I drive through New Jersey while refusing to use their gas stations-but for the most part, it works out. Turning it into a luxury or sin tax breaks the aspect of the tax that people can most readily accept.
If you sell your car, you report the mileage when you report the vehicle as sold. The same reading written on your title, that you and the buyer both agree is accurate. The idea is that you're required to get the inspection completed, in the same way you're required to obtain insurance, or in the same way several states require regular vehicle inspections; or, your lessor reports the mileage upon return of the vehicle. After all, they don't plan on paying that tax for you.
Itemized mileage is if you say "I live in Arlington, VA, but commute daily to Bethesda, MD." Or you say "I live in Louisville, KY, where my vehicle is registered, and regularly travel to Indianapolis, Columbus, and St. Louis." If enough states share the same system, they agree to pass funds back and forth. If not, this is something of an edge case, but leaves more than enough evidence of tax fraud if abused.
Not perfect means you make compliance worth it for the majority of people. California has the highest gas taxes in the country; a vehicle getting 15 mpg and driving 20,000 miles a year (deliberately choosing low efficiency and high usage) pays about $1,000 per year in current gas taxes.
Usage taxes are nice but they're not mandatory. The taxes that pay for schools aren't based on how many kids you have; if they're based on property taxes then that's a "luxury" tax by your criteria.
Sure, there are ways of recording and transmitting mileage. But there are lots of wholes. We've had a car in the family that my daughter uses for 15 years. There's no sale in which both sides agree on the mileage. As I noted, I don't take my leased EV in for any kind of annual inspection. There's no way of getting anything near 100% reporting of VMT unless it's self-reported, and good luck with that.
Meanwhile, annual license tag renewals are standard and easy. All we have to do is add another charge to the total.
And, btw, I think it would be a bad idea to charge some low-income Uber driver of that 15 mpg/20K miles car to pay $1000 whereas someone like me would pay far less.
Three cheers for three deeply useful perspectives. Now to the even more burning question - why are these (to this reader) genuinely correct views so homeless.
Well, look at the childish level of the gerrymandering debate that's playing out now - you started it! No, you started it! Everyone mouths the words that say gerrymandering isn't good, but yet keeps digging the hole deeper.
Maybe they'll soon get to rock bottom on this issue and start doing something constructive instead of destructive, but it's a very slow process, and there are a lot more issues like this than there is attention span to focus on them all.
Sorry, but Dems actually did try harder to reduce gerrymandering
I feel fairly confident that if Democrats come out of the current gerrymandering cycle with a slight advantage, they'll lose interest in any reforms that don't lock in their advantage, until population shifts erode it.
I don't think they'll trust the advantage to stick and they'd be a lot happier with a national anti-gerrymandering law. They've only been able to get the measures they have done by putting sunset clauses in; they can't rely on winning a referendum every ten years (both CA and VA have been much closer than the general D-R margin).
Good lord there are sunset clauses too? Geezus
The California one, for instance, doesn’t abolish the neutral commission - it just overrides it until the 2030 reapportionment. After 2030, the neutral commission will do a redistricting.
As Matt has written about before, Democrats are still fighting against measures they see as suppressing voter turnout despite any such measure now being to their advantage, so I don't think the observed behavior of Democrats supports your prediction.
Meaning you admit that they did in fact try harder in the past.
In both CA and VA they just recently supported the measures that they're now changing, at a time when they could have taken advantage of the numbers like they are now. This is fully consistent with their strongly held belief in norms and process.
It makes one's argument so more powerful when you ascribe motives to the other side absent any real evidence.
Actually Republicans "gerrymander for me but not for thee" all the time.
One thing about California and Virginia is that it snaps back to non-partisan in 2030 so you can't really claim they are hypocritical.
And Democrats did try to pass anti-gerrymandering legislation only to be blocked by the Republican Senate.
One solution to gerrymandering I hope happens someday, is for the large red states and blue states to reach some sort of a truce through negotiations. For instance, you can start off with draft maps in Texas, Florida, California, and New York, that each gerrymander to the max. But, maybe California and Texas can work out a deal where, from those maps, the two parties do some horse trading where Democrats offer Republicans some seats in California, in exchange for Republicans offering Democrats an equal number of seats in Texas.
The makeup of congress becomes the same as in the max-gerrymander scenario, but the district boundaries become less convoluted everywhere.
While I would not call this scenario particularly likely, I do think it's the best outcome that one can realistically hope for at this point. But, in order to have leverage for meaningful negotiations, Democrats have to first establish a willingness to play hardball. Otherwise, Republicans have no incentive to offer anything.
It's not beneficial to the state Republicans so it'll never happen. What direct good does Republican seats in California do for the Republican state government in Texas?
I agree, this outcome is not likely, for the simple reason that neither party really has an incentive to trade seats with the other, when the net balance of power in Washington would be the same, anyway. But, one can dream.
I'll believe the snapping-back when I see it. And I have yet to detect any anti-gerrymandering movement on either side whose motive wasn't to deny the other side an advantage. Both sides do it, both sides call it indefensible, both sides defend it. It's political.
The "snapping back" was written into the California and Virginia laws!
Both were able to take advantage of the Democrat voters anger at Trump. That won't be there when in 2030.
There was no provision for gerrymandering in the original laws. Gerrymandering and writing in a snapback was a figleaf for corruption. They'll write in a gerrymander and a snapback for the 2030 redistricting if it looks like the Democrats will benefit, depend on it.
“corruption”?
“Depend on it”? How the law says “no”? They’ll need to pass another proposition. Do you think that’s would be guaranteed to pass without Trump as President?
And yet, democrats also want to end it.
The first and the third seem like a straight up tradeoff of being costly versus being insufficiently strict, with the twist being that one side each on the simplistic right/left spectrum being on inverted ends of each one.
And the guest worker one seems to be a values issue of whether we want foreign people at all in the country versus fully integrating foreign customs into the country, with economic considerations a bit on the side of that, even if it's positive sum.
I think that we DO want immigrants, including some unskilled ones, but not as guest workers. See comment (now high LOL) above.
The primary system funnels freaks into general election, which then funnels them into office, and working with the opposing side is seen as selling out. Case and point, AIPAC is running attack ads against Tom Malinowski for voting “with Trump and the Republicans to fund ICE”.
The content of attack ads is often unrelated to their motive. AIPAC only cares about candidates' support for Israel, but if they deem someone insufficiently pro-Israel, they will run whatever ads they think will hurt them.
I've heard similar things about the other kind of AI PAC -- they choose politicians to oppose on the basis of who wants to regulate AI, but attack them on what they think voters won't like. I vaguely recall something about the OpenAI-funded PAC attacking a candidate for being too pro-AI when their real motive for attacking the candidate was the opposite, but I don't remember the details or where I saw it (maybe somewhere in Zvi Mowshowitz's substack, but that's a big and messy place to search).
Ezra Klein’s interview with Alex Bores: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-alex-bores.html
Thanks! Yes, I think the candidate was Bores.
Wanna bet the attack ad idea was AI generated?
Your question is answered in the post.
Prison reform is one of my obsessions too. Unfortunately, there’s very little NGO attention paid to it and all the money that is there, equates prison reform with ‘ending mass incarceration’. I want bad guys in prison but prison to not be hell for them.
I strongly agree with this.
We've been people to prison as punishment, not for punishment.
Ie the loss of freedom is supposed to be the punishment. You shouldn't have to worry about being raped or beaten while in prison
When the punishment is too harsh, judges and juries will be more reluctant to convict people. The fear of getting caught + getting punished are the only things we know deter crime. That’s a consideration the pro-prison-should-be-torture crowd should consider.
Here's a politically homeless idea (offered by Michael Kinsley decades ago). Give felons convicted of serious crimes (short of, say, murder) a choice: X years in prison (e.g., 10) or have your dominant hand surgically removed and otherwise go free.
That may be the single worst idea on this entire thread. If you're sufficiently convinced of someone's incorrigibility that you are willing to permanently disable them by maiming, then you should just be putting them to death outright. There's no point in creating work-incapable mouths to feed.
Man, I love achieving a superlative! "Single worst idea" -- I'm loving it.
Anyway, it's a *choice.* They can always choose to go to prison for 10 years. If they choose the amputation, that probably tells you something about prison.
Or if maiming is too gross, give them the choice of being lashed severely once a month for a year but otherwise are free.
One recoils from this type of physical cruelty, as we should. But, honestly, is it worse than being incarcerated? Maybe it's nice not to be raped?
Well, it caused me to double-take because you're normally... well, normal. And this is really, really not.
Yes, I'm repulsed by either possibility. And perhaps I would also hate being faced with the awful burden of choosing. So my strategy as a normal person is to do everything I can to never be convicted and have something as bad as either choice being forced on me.
I should note that if you polled all three of these “politically homeless” stances, I think it pretty likely you would get more self described Democrats than Republicans supporting your stances. I think you may right that some of the political opposition to all of these ideas may come Dems or lefty “groups” but I think that’s qualitatively different than saying these ideas are politically homeless. My point being I think you should be less sanguine about the idea your three propositions are politically homeless.
You want a “politically homeless” policy idea that I think is actually a very good one it’s proposing the US have a federal VAT. It’s probably the most economically efficient tax out there. And if your goal is to either raise revenue to fund new social programs or find a way to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit, this is the solution. In other words in theory it’s something either GOP or Democrats should or could be advocating. In practice, the opposition would be vociferous*. Business community would absolutely scream bloody murder at their costs going up and on the Left, a VAT would be demagogued as a giant sales tax that would fall on the poor (never mind you could exempt items like groceries). I feel like you need just one politician to take the “hit” by proposing it just so it’s finally out there in the political arena.
* There are so many tragedies involved with everything Trump is going. But one underrated one is given the absolute loyalty he has (or maybe had) from the Base, he had a unique opportunity to propose good taxes or fiscal policy most politicians would be too afraid to touch. And instead he decided on tariffs, one of the dumbest taxes you can have all because his brain turned to goo circa 1990 and his ideas about trade are stuck in era when fears of Japan literally buying America or “eating our lunch” was a very real thing.
I've been kind of thinking that even though both parties hate a VAT right now, if some day a budget crunch hits hard enough, both parties may feel they have no choice but to simultaneously flip flop to make it work, given that they might hate other taxes for for different reasons.
I'll be honest, as a lib I've always wondered why people like a VAT versus higher income/capital taxes (including on the middle class). It just feels like they'd both get the job done, and one would be more likely to actually be progressive. I know progressivism isn't the end all be all, but I want the poorest segment of Americans to pay as little tax as possible and even the lower middle class to not have to pay a ton.
You can't have a European-style welfare state without a European-style tax system.
When everyone pays, everyone recognizes its their own tax dollars. It's hard to shift a VAT so "the other guy" pays them and not you.
The economist will say that even if you make the income tax incredibly progressive, it ends up hitting poor people, because it raises the price of all the services that rich people employees provide to businesses frequented by poor people. If you really want to raise costs least, you want an efficient tax that hits everything equally, rather than specifically disincentivizing some forms of economic activity over others. And a VAT is supposed to be the least distortionary tax possible.
You could have a progressive consumption tax: income +loan proceeds - savings and investment with a substantial individual exemption and escalating rates. This takes care of the billionaire loophole by taxing any money loaned that isn’t for investment
I am completely in favor raising capital gains taxes to where they were in the 90s. I know there is literature indicating how you don't want to overly tax investment income given investments are ultimately what grow the economy. But it seems clear to me that we are way to the left of the curve as far as the optimal capital gains tax rate should be if the goal is to maximize revenue without causing undo damage to investment. I bring up the 90s almost as evidence of my point. I think especially in "red states" there is a ton of room to increase income taxes*; the lack of income tax in Texas and Florida is just a straight up giveaway to rich people given how little middle, working class and poor people in state income taxes especially once deductions and credits are factored in. In "blue" states like CA and NY, I do suspect you might be getting somewhat close to the limits how much you can raise taxes without causing real economic harm, but no I do not believe GOP rhetoric (and especially hedge fund manager rhetoric**) that raising taxes on the 1% even a tiny amount is going to cause some avalanche of rich people to "flee" to Florida or something**.
My point being I'm not at all against the idea there is room to increase Capital gains taxes and income taxes to help fund various government programs without undo damage to the economy. I think the issue is given some of the spending proposals out there from various Democrats or left leaning orgs, it's not at all clear that there is enough money that can be generated via increasing capital gains taxes or income taxes to fund these programs unless you raised capital gains taxes and income taxes to such a degree that it would actually cause real economic harm (my guess is at or near 50% is where you start having problems). And lets be real, what we're really talking about is "Medicare for All"***. If we want some "Medicare for All", you're going to need a funding source that goes beyond modestly higher capital gains taxes and income taxes. And the appeal of VAT is its a great funding source that also comes with minimal damage (or at least less damage) to the economy than the "deadweight loss" that comes from other taxes.
** If there is something that causes my inner Lenin to come out even briefly it's when Hedge Fund Managers talk about the burden of higher taxes and then very theatrically "flee" to Florida in a way that gets headlines in WSJ and CNBC. Given Hedge Fund Managers via the carried interest loophole are some of the least taxed rich people in America, their complaints are especially nauseating and to be frank disgusting.
*** One thing I do think is damaging from Bernie is his specific "Medicare for All" proposal goes way beyond most other socialized health care systems. I don't think it's really recognized how unique UK's system given the government owns both the hospitals and provides single payer insurance. But my bigger point is there are way less costly ways to get to socialized medicine then what Bernie proposed, but unfortunately he's created an "anchor" in too many Progressives brains which means other plans that are still quite comprehensive in their scope get pilloried as some how selling out to rich special interests.
State income taxes are great for other states to have!
So says the Washingtonian!
And yes, I totally support other states having state income taxes, to motivate businesses to locate themselves in my state
The only states I’ve lived in are Tennessee, Florida, and Washington state, so the idea of a state income tax is mind-bogglingly crazy to me.*
Like that is simply not a thing that is taken out of one’s paycheck.
*I have had a couple of paychecks out of a state where they had a state income tax and it was enough to make one viscerally angry at one’s pay stub. Especially when you consider that was in a very low services place!
Why are prisons so dysfunctional?
I read yesterday that California spends four times as much per prisoner as Texas, without any obvious impact. There are specific issues with union in California but that seems only part of the explanation. There seems to be two general problems standards aren't enforced and spending isn't rigorously investigated for value.
Government has, over the past 20-30 years, completely lost the capacity to investigate spending for value. I don’t really know why but it’s the story over and over.
I think a lot of this is downstream of proceduralism/litigation that really started taking off in the 70s. A lot of the burden placed on government is cumulative, so it's progressively gotten worse over time.
Auditors cost money. It costs money to protect money.
RE: CA vs TX There are many contributing factors but one I’m aware of is that California and Texas are in different federal judiciary districts, California being much more liberal than Texas, and down stream of that California prisons are under some federal consent decrees that mandate spending on healthcare and mental health that Texas is not.
Globally, the issue IMO is that most aspects of prisons, and crime/punishment in general have very different theories of action, desired outcomes etc in lib vs leftist vs conservative groups.
Conservative: bad people commit crimes, they should be punished for their bad behavior, and society should also be protected from bad people. Prison exists to punish bad people and protect society from their badness.
Center/Lib: prison isn’t a punishment, it’s deterrence. The way prison lowers crime is through motivating people to not want to go prison. We should do an appropriately small amount of prison to deter crime and it shouldn’t be cruel.
Leftist: prison causes crime. It disrupts families and drives poverty in impacted communities. The outcomes prison drives are worse than a world with no prison, so we should have a little prison as society can stomach, ideally zero prison.
But does California's prison system optimise for their objectives? It seems to be expensive and abusive without being left wing in any direction.
"does California's prison system optimise for their objectives"
its hard to optimize a system for any objective when the multiple stakeholders (judiciary, state executive branch, the public, the people who work at the prison) have a completely different understanding of that the system is, what is should do, and what it actually does currently in practice.
I can understand it being a total mess, the question is why is it four times more of a mess than Texas which has similar mixed incentives and unclear leadership
To be clear, I think this price differential is dumb, I'm not justifying it.
One example of cost expansion in CA, as I mentioned in my upstream reply, is that California prisons are under federal consent decrees that mandate spending on healthcare and mental health that Texas is not. The federal judiciary in california is notably more liberal/left than that in texas and they mandated this service provision.
CA labor is more expensive do to unions and higher housing costs. Construction is much cheaper in texas than CA. TX prisons use a lot of prison labor, CA doesn't.
The physical conditions in the prisons are quite different for the prisoners. CA prisons have air conditioning, texas prisons largely dont. California health care for prisoners is much better than texas health care for prisoners. California has a lot more programming for inmates paid for by the state involving NGOs that texas does not.
Prison in texas is a materially different experience than prison in CA
Does this (expensive) materially different experience produce better results?
I think your reply is saying that even if Ca was better at investigating why their costs are higher, it might not make much difference because they have such different goals?
yes, my point is that its hard to optimize a system then the different stakeholders (judiciary, legislators/dem party, executive brand, the people who actually run the prison, the public) have completely different understandings of the purpose the system serves
Is it really true that California prisons are not better than Texas prisons?
Doesn’t Texas famously have prisons without air conditioning?
I am a European, that describes most hotels and houses.
Europe famously has a different climate than Texas.
You are providing room, board, and healthcare with the added need for security. That’s just going to be expensive.
I would be a little surprised if there was not a difference between Texas and California prisons.
I'm glad you mentioned parole along with prisons. When I got out of college, I had a temp job as a typist in the Canton, Ohio, parole office for 2 years, and it was certainly eye opening. I typed up all the reports from the parole officers, as well as reports on prospective parolees, and I regularly interacted with the officers and the existing parolees in the office. This was a long time ago (late 1990s), but there were lot of challenges that probably haven't changed much:
1. The officers were perpetually underfunded and understaffed. The Officers all had way too many people on their caseloads, and the process of ending parole early for otherwise well-behaved parolees was arduous. (This was especially true for out of state transfers, since the issuing state had to give permission - there were guys from Texas with 10-year parole lengths, which is really long).
2. It's really hard to place ex-convicts in housing and get them a job. All of the officers I worked with were really trying to help these guys stay straight (if there were problems, it was more work for the officer), but there were so many obstacles that even the parolees who were trying to get their lives back together had a really hard go of it.
3. Because of #2, most of them wound up back in their old neighborhoods, around all the influences that got them in trouble in the first place.
4. Most of the parolees I met were regular people who made bad choices, or were in really horrible circumstances. A handful seemed like genuine jerks; I don't know if they were that way before they went to prison or not.
5. A lot of the elements of complying with supervision make it harder to have a full-time job (regular reporting to the office during business hours, etc.)
6. Almost all of the parolees were men; the majority were drug offenders who had served short sentences. The others were a mix of prostitutes, sex offenders, check kiters, etc., and there were about a half dozen murderers. The murderers, because they had been institutionalized for so long, were the most agreeable people to deal with.
7. The whole system as it existed at the time I worked there was really frustrating for everyone -- the officers, the parolees, the families, etc.
Thank you for the informative post!
This is why I buy Dave’s Killer bread: it’s a bit expensive, but it tastes good *and* the company makes a point of hiring ex-convicts to give them a way to earn a living. (The founder is an ex-convict himself IIRC.)
Here in Cleveland there is a restaurant group that does something very similar called Edwin's.
Short 40 min video on Edwin’s:
https://youtu.be/U7cW60vhP4Y
Like Second Chance Furniture in Baltimore!
I feel like technology could solve a lot of 5)
A significant amount of the in-person requirements are peeing in a cup while a parole officer watches you. Funny thing - if you are the only male secretary in the parole office (I was actually the only male secretary in the entire Ohio Adult Parole Authority in 1997 and 1998) everyone will assume that you are actually an officer, and that you have you a gun, and that you can watch them pee, too; thankfully, that was not part of my duties. Also interesting, the full-time, non-temp secretaries did not carry guns, but received annual firearms training.
#2: Housing theory of everything strikes again.
Having lived a while in a place with access to cheap au pairs - Hong Kong - I can affirm that it is an amazing way to raise a young family. Instead of two working parents who always feel overwhelmed, you actually are able to be your own adult still. Date nights aren't this impossible thing to schedule around a high schooler's life for one.
I used to have this Puritanism about hiring other people to do things for you but having a little kid is pretty overwhelming! We never had an au pair but did hire housecleaners and night nannies. I had to promise to get over it to have our second kid and must admit it makes life way better. We should be making it easier to outsource household tasks to willing people who get paid a fair wage regardless of where they happen to have been born.
I have the similar mental block. I wonder what would have changed with an au pair.
It's some low-hanging fruit for the fertility crisis.
Oh it took me a while to hire someone for that reason. But I hate ironing my clothes and when I realized I was spending twice as much per week as it would cost me to hire a cleaner to come to my tiny apartment twice a week, clean it all, AND iron my clothes, I got over that mental block. (This was pre kids)
I was guessing that Matt's views on housing, education, and the global poor were going to make the list, but he's written a lot about those, and perhaps that wouldn't have fit with the additional metric of "conflict in profound ways with the agendas of both sides".
I sort of kind of guessed that taxes on greenhouse gases would make the list, evoking my usual "*shudder* Pigouvian taxes" reaction.
I would certainly accept a guest worker program as a compromise, but I don't see why such work should be time limited if the worker and the employer still like their professional relationship with each other.
The prison take I definitely wasn't expecting, and that's a good one. It always does baffle me how drugs in particular get into prisons. And the tradeoffs of cost versus incarceration are indeed tricky.
On the prisons issue, I remember Democrats making a lot of political hay out of Alabama Governor Kay Ivey spending COVID stimulus on the construction of new prisons. The idea was that Ivey was supporting mass incarceration over fighting COVID.
But many Alabama prisons are awful, some don't even have air conditioning. As this article notes, it's important to give criminals better prison conditions, so they don't recidivate and for simple human rights reasons. You'd think progressives would understand this.
Seattle had a similar dynamic with the county juvenile jail. The county executive championed a ballot measure to fund a new one in 2012 due to bad conditions in the old one, and it was approved by voters. It opened in 2020 (bad timing) and progressives HATED the fact that money was spent on juvenile detention at all. The same county executive then called for closing it, just months after it had opened. In 2024, still the same county executive (this guy was in office for a long time) changed tack again, decided the new jail was going to stay open, and declined to seek reelection. The county council went through pretty much the same twists and turns through all of this time.
Anthony Kennedy wrote a real good SCOTUS opinion detailing the problem with overcrowded prisons in particular. Probably can't push further with this SCOTUS, though, and if anything I wouldn't be surprised if states facing budget crunches start packing them in again and dare this SCOTUS to overturn what Kennedy wrote.
The worse, the better, because the more awful the prisons are, the more viable prison abolition becomes. (Yes we're only going from 0% to 0.1% in probability of success, but still worth the tradeoff in their minds.)
Yep, total "Those contradictions won't heighten themselves!" energy there.
Ooh recidivate, didn't know that could be a verb. Slick! Love catching new words.
With apologies to Hank Stram, do prison football teams recidivate the ball down the field?
I mean it should be said that using COVID relief funds to build more prisons is worthy of some opprobrium no? Especially given prisons were huge vectors for spreading COVID?
Add in that the cost to build the prison ballooned from $600 million to over a billion (in a state that is famously not exactly rich. Tradeoffs and all that). Add in Alabama’s less than stellar record in properly administering justice and making sure people who don’t deserve to go to prison actually don’t end up in prison, not hard to see the case for opposition.
Feel like this is a case where the loudness of the “defund the police” brigade and some ot their more unworkable and unwise ideas is maybe distracting us from the fact that a lot prisons really do have way too many people in them setting aside how humane conditions are in said prison.
Well, you just provided another datapoint that Matt's view is politically homeless
It's more that the particular case of this new prison authorized by Governor Ivey is not really a great example to use for the point Ben is trying to make. Too many confounding variables where opposition to this prison makes a lot more sense.
My suspicion is the better example for Matt's take is in California. And they kind of have gone down the route already. SB 32 passed which significantly curtailed the use of private prisons and made existing prisons more humane. In addition, there has clearly been a counter weight movement against "soft on crime" prosecutors or just general state of disorder and crime in San Francisco. Given political make up in this area, this means a whole lot of Democrats are pretty on board with more decisive prison sentences.
In other words, advice for the various candidates for governor especially the Democratic ones. Propose something along the lines of what Matt is proposing and my suspicion you'd pick up some momentum and specifically momentum from a decent number of registered Democrats.
'I would certainly accept a guest worker program as a compromise, but I don't see why such work should be time limited if the worker and the employer still like their professional relationship with each other.'
The nature of birthright citizenship means that conservatives will inevitably conclude that a guest worker program without specific end-dates is no different in terms of its effects from what they hate about other immigration pathways.
Sure, these are takes that both parties hate for their own reasons, after all. I was just speaking on the merits.
Matt: “climate change is a real problem, that it is worth bearing some cost to address, but also that it is not an apocalypse-scale problem that is worth bearing infinite costs to address.”
Matt has taught me a lot about the political economy of climate change. Here we see one crucial mistake: he delegitimizes by overstatement (“apocalypse”, “infinite”) where there is a real, awful looming disaster: the melting of Antarctic ice sheets that will submerge many of the world’s great metropolises. He is absolutely right that we cannot solve the politics of it. He is absolutely wrong to dismiss the physical reality and the economic, humanitarian, and political catastrophes that it threatens.
Isn’t the point of a price that it acknowledges the exact scale of the problem you mention?
The question you raise, roughly, “what is the ratio of the revenue generated by a non-existent, unimplementable carbon tax over decades to the strictly unmeasurable cost of a meter* of sea level rise arriving between about 2055 and 2130?” is orthogonal to the question I raised: “what is the responsibility of us in the chattering classes given our knowledge that that sea-level rise is coming and will be catastrophic (not apocalyptic) in its effects?”
I understand Matt’s take to be “electoral democracies have no viable path to taking action to avert it in the near term”, which I agree with. I disagree with Matt’s ending the discussion there. My descendants will face something WWII-scale destruction. I think we should continue working and scheming to reduce it, as I have done for the last decade.
* (there is probably a better estimate)
I think if we are going to take meaningful action, it will mostly be from better technology. So permitting reform stuff that allows the improving technogies to be deployed without a 20 year series of environmental hearings and blocking lawsuits seems really important. The way things work now, it is much easier to leave a coal-fired plant in place burning coal and pumping out CO2 and a lot of nasty stuff besides, rather than to build a non-coal plant (nuclear, say) to replace it.
Yes. Here is an elaboration of just how extensive a refiguring of our political economy that will be: https://energyandstuff.substack.com/p/pax-electricana
Because if it isn't time limited then the state will in the end, find itself paying welfare costs.
How so if they're still getting paid to do their job? If they no longer have that job then I would certainly say they should leave.
I don't know how it happens, but it always does and inevitably will.
We’re pretty strict with H1Bs - find a job in 60 days or you’re out.
Do the people who don't get a job end up leaving?
H1Bs? Yes, they’re all extremely conservative about the possibility of losing their jobs.
Mostly
I don't know about the inevitability, seems like a policy execution choice to me.
Looks like a Dr. Manhattan meme situation.
One thing I think I remember reading is that when farm workers get green cards or citizenship, they go into construction, which pays better and is less arduous. Is your proposal that workers can stay as long as they'd like as long as they only work for the one employer? That seems like a ripe opportunity for employers to abuse their employees with the threat of basically deporting them if they don't do what they say. (Maybe this already exists with temporary worker programs, I'm just throwing it out there).
A theme I notice is that all these involve a right-coded solution (eg markets) to a left coded problem (climate change) or vice versa. I haven’t read all the comments, but a lot of them seem to have the same flavor. The problem and solution have opposed valence.
I understand why this makes them politically hard, but it is sad.
Hmm. This is a fascinating observation. A matrix of these would be interesting. Especially if you then added in which countries are using whatever particular combination to note where it happens in reality.
My biggest one. More voting does not improve democracy.
More fundamentally: Democracy isn't the end goal, it's the means we use to get to our end goal. Our end goal is human flourishing, good governance, peace and prosperity, safe streets and well-functioning public services and a well-ordered society.
Democracy isn't actually a good way to accomplish a lot of this. It's just a critical bit of feedback needed to ensure that the system doesn't run off the rails in a way that clobbers too many people at once. But many popular things are really bad to do. You can probably win an election on setting a maximum price for food below the cost of production--demonstrably you can win elections doing that for rental housing. This will be catastrophically bad, but voters are mostly not paying that much attention and are kinda dumb, so....
Republicans agree with this, it isn't homeless.
Hi Matt Y,
I truly am Slow and Boring! I agree with all these views!
Personal story: when our son was little, my husband and I hired three consecutive au pairs. It was a great experience overall. Au Pair #1 was a sweet, kind, caring, somewhat shy girl who did an awesome job, but at the end of her first year she announced that she missed her family too much and she went back to Brazil. Au Pair #2 was a good person, but we clashed because of incompatible personalities - she thought we were stodgy and no fun, we thought she was a bit thoughtless and irresponsible - but it worked out ok in the end, and our son did have fun with her. She went to work for another family after leaving us. Finally, Au Pair #3 was a superstar, our son is still in touch with her, she married an immigrant and applied to stay here long-term based on her marriage, and now she and her husband have a baby of their own.
My most politically homeless idea is that immigration law should be primarily enforced against employers and only incidentally enforced against individuals (basically, violent criminals who we're already arresting anyway). Almost all deportation should be self-deportation caused by economic incentives. Attacking the supply of illegal labor is no more effective than attacking the supply of illegal drugs.
To that end, I would sponsor a False Claims Act-style bounty-hunting program where immigrants can turn in lawbreaking employers in exchange for money and permanent residency. That will almost immediately dry up the willingness of employers to hire people without actually verifying employment eligibility. The infrastructure for this (the U visa program) is already largely in place but it needs additional legislation to make it effective. Similarly, just about any labor-law violation, when reported by an undocumented worker, should carry with it an automatic I-9 audit and a U visa for the worker.
This is politically homeless because Democrats want more immigration and don't care how they get it (and are beholden to Groups that operate as de facto advocates for illegal immigration) while Republicans want a pool of rights-less labor to exploit while simultaneously demagoguing against.
How about people who overstay their tourist visa and / or work informally, like setting up stands at swap meets or fruit stands and things like that?
A bounty system on employers is very interesting, though.
Informal self-employment is probably one of the few areas where direct enforcement is necessary, yeah. But I don't think it's inconsistent with my position because those people are effectively acting as both employer and employee.
Sounds good in theory when it sounds like you’re only targeting big corporations until you start going after family restaurants and people hiring nannies etc.
Well, that would produce political pressure to provide proper guest visa paths for restaurant workers and nannies.
It still doesn’t fix the need for an exploited underclass to pick crops and work in slaughterhouses though, we would also need a guest worker program in such a world
I would simply not have an exploited underclass. Sufficient legal immigration will ensure an adequate labor supply, paid at legally appropriate rates. If companies take a hit, cry me a river.
It's not just companies that take a hit. Farms can't get legal citizens to pick crops for the minimum wage. The wages required would make them unviable to sell at market. Fruit and veggies especially would die on the vine. We'd either have to buy from other countries (using their exploited underclasses) or maybe innovate more with green houses and vertical farms.
Here's an article from when Alabama and Georgia kicked out the illegal farm workers and tried to hire Americans: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alabama-immigration-law-farms_n_58c1d07fe4b0ed71826b55e0/amp
Most of the ideas I care the most about are in the "experiencing houselessness" category. Probably the biggest one is my anti-income tax, pro-property tax (well ideally LVT, but I'll take what I can get) stance. Most normies just think about taxes in terms of "how much do I have to pay?" I don't blame them for thinking this. Efficiency of said taxes is nowhere in the calculation. I also think the issue of taxation gets overmoralized by the general public, as if the only reason we'd want somebody to pay taxes is because we don't like them. This is how we get lefties only wanting to tax billionaires and corporations, and MAGAs somehow funding the government out of tariff revenue or something.
I guess in a similar vein, my leftiest view that I didn't mention a few weeks ago is that conservatives need to get over poor people receiving benefits. The whole issue of "make welfare recipients fill out a million job applications, take drug tests, weigh them, and only let them eat nutriloaf," at a certain point, I don't think we're trying to save money, I think we're just signalling that we don't like these people. Which is fine, you don't have to like anybody, but most conservatives I talk to don't have the balls to say "if somebody refuses to get a job, they should starve to death," so we're back to square one. You're going to pay taxes to support these people, whether it's on welfare or in prison.
I think that may just be what annoys me the most, is people wildly and confidently over or underestimating what things cost. This was the whole DOGE thing. No Elon, the entire deficit is not attributable to foreign aid. Nor is it attributable to aid to Israel, lefties.
I think there should be a safety net.
I also think that safety net should come with strings. It should be a hand up not a hand out (assuming the person is able bodied and minded of course)
I also don't think we should be subsidizing eating of unhealthy foods
My politically homeless idea is that we shouldn’t do SNAP benefits, the government should distribute healthy food staples out of their own distribution center instead.
I’d rather the government just give people cash and if they want to encourage healthy eating, just subsidize healthy stuff and tax unhealthy stuff.
My most conservative idea is that poor people are actually highly likely to poorly deploy money, so giving them cash with no strings attached is actually an idea with significant downsides.
I also support involuntary commitment for the most extreme cases.
I don't have time to get in to extreme detail here, but most people who are poor are temporarily poor, they lost their job, their relationship ended unexpectedly and their partner was the breadwinner, stuff like that. It's smoother to just give people cash than have them fill out a million forms, then pull the rug out from under them when they finally do get a job.
What evidence is there that most people who are poor are only temporarily poor?
That's probably the best idea
I was going to respond to your other comment but glad we agree! Saved me some time.
This is why my idea is so perfectly homeless: Libs don't like it because it's paternalistic and insulting to the poors, conservatives don't like it because it so freely gives things away to the poors, and neolibs and centrists don't like it because it skips around the market and gets within range of government grocery stores.
No one likes your idea because it's a bad idea. Grocery is maybe the most competitive market in the United States. Who benefits from getting the government involved? Poor people wouldn't like it because instead of being able to buy groceries at the Wal-Mart you work at or the Krogers by your house, you have to take the bus 20 miles to get your government cheese. Grocery stores wouldn't like it because they still get revenue from low-dollar purchases. Taxpayers sure as hell wouldn't like paying for the creation of an entirely new set of infrastructure even though no one's having difficulty finding groceries today.
So who is this for? You, so you don't have to see poor people when you shop at Whole Foods?
lol, with the “Whole Foods” line.